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The station at
K5TR:
160 meters:
- sloping vertical from 120', fixed E
- sloping vertical from 120', fixed W
80 meters:
- Sloping dipole from 120', fixed NE
- Sloping dipole from 120', fixed NW
40 meters:
- two element Force 12 yagi at 120', rotatable
- two element Cushcraft yagi at 90', rotatable
20 meters:
- six element 44' boom yagi at 80', rotatable
- six element 44' boom yagi at 80', fixed NE
- six element 44' boom yagi at 40', fixed NW
- four element Cushcraft 32' boom yagi at 60', fixed SE
15 meters:
- six element 36' boom yagi at 70', rotatable
- six element 36' boom yagi at 35', fixed NE
- four element Cushcraft yagi at 50', fixed SE
10 meters:
- six element 24' boom yagi at 60', rotatable
- six element 24' boom yagi at 30', fixed NE
- four element Cushcraft yagi at 45', fixed SE
- three element yagi at 20', fixed W
Receiving antennas:
- Four 500' long Beverages fixed NE, NW, SE, SW
Radio 1: Kenwood TS-850SAT, Ameritron AL-1500
Radio 2: Kenwood TS-850SAT, Ameritron AL-1200
Headset: Heil Proset HC-4
DVK: W9XT Contest Card
Software: TR Log 6.78
Other: Ameritron RCS-8V antenna switches, ICE bandpass
filters, Top Ten Devices Band Decoders, homebrew
audio switchbox
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Thanks to George for letting me use his station again. This was the first time I've operated this contest in the Single Operator, All Band category. When I've entered in the past, it's always been in the Multi-Operator or a Single Operator, Single Band category. This was also my first ever 48-hour single operator DX contest effort.
40 meters and 80 meters seemed better on the first night than the second night. In particular, I had a great run on 40 meters to Japan and Oceania on the first night from about 0700 UTC to about 1000 UTC that was a lot of fun. Although I kept checking, I never heard 20 meters open over the north pole as it sometimes does in the 0800 UTC to 1100 UTC time frame on either night.
20 meters to Europe was a lot better for me on Sunday than it was on Monday, but I never felt like it was a very good opening on either day. For the most part, it was thin to northern and eastern Europe. I didn't hear or work a single station from Finland, even!
15 meters was open both days, primarily to the Caribbean and South America. Saturday evening, I was able to work some Japanese stations on the band as well, which is always fun. If 10 meters was open on Saturday, I missed it, as almost all of my 10 meter QSOs were on Sunday afternoon to Central America, South America, and only parts of the Caribbean.
I probably did not have the best sleep strategy. In retrospect, the 90 minutes I took off in the 2100 UTC hour Saturday was a mistake, as I had ample time to sleep the second night. Things were so slow on the low bands that I feel like my five hours of sleep then probably lost me fewer than 20 potential contacts total. In fact, I woke up sometime in the 1100 UTC hour, tuned through all three open bands, found not one new station to call, and decided to go back to sleep.
One of the amplifiers stopped functioning on Sunday afternoon. I'm not sure what happened, but the meter showed no high voltage. I operated the remainder of the contest with just one amplifier.
It seems like I need to work more on getting multipliers into the log.
Contest Logging was done with TR LOG contest logging software. The following reports and log were created using TR LOG's post-contest processor.
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Last Updated 26 June 2020 wm5r@wm5r.org |