Well, I missed you all up there in EN34 land during the contest....for a good reason....
I was not able to get the tower up with the 50 MHz thru 3456 MHz bands, the winds just were to strong to risk it.... So, I took the kids to the Sioux City Hamfest on Saturday Morning. On the way back, the 6M band was way open and I was working guys left and right from the mobile, just a typical vertical on the truck. That got me to thinking, so when I got home about noon, I tuned up my StepperIR HF vertical to the 3/4 wavelenght mode on 6M. It had an excellent match and I hooked my 6M system into it. This was the first time I was using my SDR-1000 at 28 MHz IF driving a transverter on 6M which was to get broke in during the contest. Well when I turned it on, the band was full of signals. A few checks and getting Roverlog on the laptop was all I needed. With the vertical, I did 400+ QSOs and 117 grids the first day, most in the first 3 to 4 hours. The band was open pretty much all day up till about 10:30 or 11:00 PM, so I hit the sack. When it was very hot and heavy, I was able to run a frequency for over an hour and get mutiple call backs to CQing. When things died down a bit, CQs would go unanswered, so I would hunt and pounce. The band was full many times up to 50.300 here. It was intresting using a vertical during the contest, kind of gave a new prespective. I would hear a grid and begin to think about rotating the antenna to that heading, but I would have to stop myself :) Hearing signals and getting callbacks from east, west and south was pretty neat. The SDR-1000 never burped the whole time (using official realease 1.6), and I hit it pretty hard with actually having QSO rate the first few hours of the contest, and then for an hour and a half period later in the day. Having extreamly strong signals from all parts of the country at the same time would have put most rigs to shame, but with the awsome filters and using a SSB Electronics LT6S transverter made it a non-issue. I operated alot below 50.200 where the big guns were at and was able to pull the weak ones out, even when right next to K1WHS, K8GP, etc. When it came to hunting and pouncing, the SDR-1000 got an A++. I could fnd / see these signals pop up, click em and work them before they were gone. This made alot of difference when it came to finding some weaker multipliers. I was using the wider bandscope where the width is +/- 20 KHz. This came to be extreamly handy and quite easy after a few minutes of opeartion. In addition, when it came to finding a clear freq, that was very handy as well. I could find a few big guns, see a small spot between and fit myself in there. It was intresting to see who had their amps adjusted correctly and who had not....there is a wide varience on the big guns on how this looked. Im naming no names....The guys who had it right were very distinct 2 to 2.5 KHz wide signal with almost slope, others were much much wider. Those wider guys I had to stay away from as even the filters wont help there :) Sunday was pretty slow, brief opening to all parts, but few and far between. I ended up being around 490 total QSOs and 143 mults or so, cant recall exactly. I heard some outrageouse numbers on how many 6M QSOs were done on the first day by some, I will bet I could have doubled mine if my yagi was up. Also, the run to my HF StepperIR vertical is pretty long, LMR-400 - I would guess I had a few dB loss there too. However, it was better than nothing and I was able to get on the contest for breaking in the new 6M SDR1K setup. Short skip on 6M was in bigtime most of the day and on Sunday. I was not surprised to hear about the 2M Es...too bad I missed that too. The vertical is not too good of a local antenna. Hence no 5, 10 and 24 GHz contacts were made...not able to contact anyone in close to do the coordination. (That microwave tower was up...) The only two locals I contacted on 6M was EN41and EN23...both very weak. I did hear Tim and Pat - K9ILT/R one time when they were in EN60, but could not get ahold of them. For those wondering if the SDR-1000 can be a contest radio, well I dont think one can abuse it any more than I did over the weekend. Works just fine and gives alot of advantage! I for one cant ever fathom going back to a dial radio.....I only used the mouse wheel and clicking for the tuning. Takes a few minutes to get used to it, but after a bit you wont need anything else. Thanks for all the QSOs! 73 Mike - KM0T - EN13vc www.km0t.com Come and join us here in Bloomington, Minnesota, home of the Mall of America, July 27 & 28, 2006 for the 40th annual Central States VHF Society Conference which will be hosted once again by the NLRS. _______________________________________________ FlexRadio mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com
