It sounds like Murphy was having a field day this weekend. Almost everyone
we talked to had some sort of equipment failures, and we were no exception.
The remote antenna switch wasn't working, so we had a manual switch that we
dropped into place last minute - this required jumping out of the car and
climbing a step ladder to move between microwave bands. My 10GHz station
was stuck in transmit, en route to our first location I managed to fix that
but in the process snapped the little stud where 12V goes into the xvrtr so
it wouldn't power up. A mishap broke the headphone connector on our 6m rig
fairly early on, we limped on for a little bit but after a while we totally
lost audio and so didn't have the band until we were able to pick up a
second rig on Sunday morning. Even after getting the new rig in place we
kept running into SWR issues, jiggling the coax seemed to help. There's
something funky with the moxon. 1.2GHz was totally deaf, we swapped out the
transverter and the second transverter didn't work. We repaired that
Saturday night at the house, turns out the power connector was broken.
2.3GHz had high SWR the entire time, couldn't hear a thing and no one could
hear us. Something was clearly wrong, we're not sure what. 3GHz...I don't
know what was going on there. It appeared to be working but we never heard
anyone and no one could hear us. It's entirely possible and likely that 45
elements was just way too narrow for armstrong rotation, and without GPS
lock we couldn't be sure of our frequency either.
Saturday was mostly a wash. We got some unique mults and made maybe 30
contacts the whole day across all bands. We spent way too much time trying
to fix and work around issues and it killed our flow.
Sunday was much better. We were busy at every grid. After the first site we
totally gave up on 2 and 3 gig, it was costing us too much time for zero
Qs. We overran our first site on time and so skipped our FN41 spot, this
was probably a good choice as both Soapstone and Hogback were very
productive for us.
It is BUSY even as a dual op rover with the microwaves. With 6 operational
bands, we still were juggling a lot. I misplaced my head lamp somewhere in
the car, and so at Hogback in the dark I was trying to hold a flashlight in
my mouth while writing logs while also talking on a half dozen bands. A
couple times I was leaning over the front seat trying to work stations on
another radio while Chris was busy somewhere on another band.
That said, the microwaves probably saved this for us. 2 and 6 were DEAD.
Almost no one heard calling CQ on either, no enhancement noted on any bands
at all. We had roughly equal QSO counts on the bottom 4 bands. Very few
stations were unique to any particular grid, one way or another we'd come
across the same set of people. Fortunately they tended to be well equipped
stations and we could quickly work all 6 bands. We didn't have digital
modes, and we could hear some traffic on 50.313 but I'm not sure how much
was actually there either.
All in all we had about 60 mults and a total score in the vicinity of 16k.
Much better than we expected after the mess that was Saturday but still not
what we'd hoped. We have a bunch of changes to make, and things to repair.
It was still a fun outing, Sunday saved that part, so not all was lost.
Looking forward to January!
73,
Sean WA1TE (K1SIG/R)
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