It turned out to be a difficult contest, but with a decent final
score of: 970/93 = 270,630 (Single-Band 40 High Power)
Thought I was all set two weeks ago after finishing the 2-el 40, but
Mother Nature had other ideas. Got heavy rain (and static) at 2355
Friday. I did mostly S&P for an hour, then the real storm hit. The
wind sheared the 1/4" bolt locking the mast to the rotator, plus the
SWR went high on the beam. Took most of the second hour off to avoid
lightning, assess the damage and monitor activity on www.weather.com
With 2.5:1 SWR, I could only run about 600 watts and had to keep track
of the antenna's "weather vane" action. About 0700, the SWR jumped
again and I couldn't use the beam. Luckily, I had strung a wire dipole
NW/SE at about 50 ft. to cover the Caribbean - not much, but I could keep
operating. Finished Saturday morning with 415/77, well below my pre-
contest goal.
After 5-hours of sleep, I cranked down the tower for a look. No apparent
physical damage, so the problem is either the matching section or the
loading coils. Don't know if it's water or wind; post-mortem comes later.
I removed the beam, took off the reflector element and lashed up a direct
coax feed to use it as a rotatable dipole. Too much work in the middle of
a contest, but it kept me from quitting! Got back on at 2315 Sat.
Worked some great stuff - D68C called me a full two hours after their
sunrise. Only one mult heard and not worked (HL). Conditions were OK, but
the activity was low outside of Europe. Only got 91 JAs, but some of them
were QRP, so I know the band was open. 40 of the 806 Europeans were QRP
and the first ZL in the log was QRP. Was everyone on the high bands?
Rigs: (2) IC-765, Alpha 99
Ants: 00-07 Sat - 2-el @ 75 ft
07-13 Sat - NW/SE dipole @ 50 ft
Remaining time - rotatable dipole @ 75 ft
(2) 360 ft Beverages, NE and NW (extremely valuable)
73, Gary
K9AY
PS: Here's a REALLY WEIRD fact -- I did not work KP4 or KL7!
--
SECC on the Web: http://secc.contesting.com/
Submissions: secc@contesting.com
Administrative requests: secc-REQUEST@contesting.com
Problems: owner-secc@contesting.com
|