Hello VHFers
It was very difficult to operate without 50 or 144 MHz this weekend.
Those bands are needed to find other stations and then run up to the
higher bands. With energy costs thru the roof, I took out the 10 meter
and six meter op position after the ARRL 10 Meter contest in mid
December along with my solar lithium battery system. My higher freq VHF
shack is unheated, so after walking up the road to the VHF shack, and
starting the diesel generator, the room temp was about 35 and the
electric baseboard heating started working at warming up the room. I
only had 222 and 432, but it was my first effort with using just one
operating position. That took some getting used to. I kept turning the
wrong rotators! I have since made up more labels for the many rotator
control boxes. I was QRV from about 00:00 to about 03:00 UT on Saturday
evening only, and things were slow due to no 144 MHz access. I found the
chat pages to be difficult to use as messages can easily get lost in the
weeds with all the activity. Guys in the active areas were hard to
corner. I had better luck with people far away from activity centers on
the chat pages. I think it is information overload!! Things were slow
here, but conditions were OK. The antennas were not iced up and both 222
and 432 performed as usual. No exotic DX was worked. It was fun for work
N3NGE and N3EXA. Normally I was an operator at N3NGE for January, back
when multi-op efforts were fun. N3NGE sounded like a local up here in
FN43 Mumbo Jumbo land. S9 on both 222 and 432! I worked very few
stations to the South. Opportunity was just not there in the short time
I was active. Again, I really missed having a 144 station here. I did
snag VE3ZV in EN92 on 222. VE3MIS was peaking S7 on 432 SSB from
Toronto, but we could not work on 222.
222 MHz 21 stations 14 grids
432 MHz 19 stations 11 grids
Total score was 1900 points. I did not operate any digital modes and
stayed analog, but did listen a bit on FT8 and heard many unknown calls
from around New England. In the past, I have been underwhelmed by the
efficiency and effectiveness of FT8 on VHF. I think it helps out those
who do not know Morse Code, so it gives some ops a great boost. I do not
see much of any boost here, so I operate analog only. MSK144 and JT65
etc are very effective, but with my short activity period, I did not
have a chance at those modes. I only ran CW and SSB.
It started snowing again on Sunday night and now the ground has a
covering of over 20" and it is still snowing. I think my 222 Activity
periods are on hold for awhile. With 2 ft of snow, the trek up the hill
gets very difficult!!
73
Dave K1WHS
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