[ILQSO] IQP Adventures

[ilqso@mailman.qth.net]

I finally got done with my PA log and started on the IL log.  Then I
remembered a couple of things I should mention.

If anyone wonders what I was doing with the county names, I forgot to add
the county abbreviation to my county list - and forgot to bring the list
with me... not for the first time in my travels.

Anyway, sorry for the confusion; some even helped by repeating my county
with the correct abbreviation.  EFFI vs EFFG was a good example of my
guessing... Fortunately most of the counties I ran used the first four
characters.

Another thing was my Hustler antenna.  While I was at the county hunter
convention in TN (Murfreesboro if it matters), we had some college kids
playing in the parking lot Friday night.  Most of the mobile antennas (50
or more) got some unneeded adjustments.  My resonator bracket was bent so
my resonators were horizontal instead of the usual vertical position.

Naturally SWR was all screwed up and I left my SWR Analyzer at home...
had several CRS attacks this trip!  I adjusted the brackets and made some
QRM adjusting for SWR and everything looked OK.

When I started the contest, I worked on 15M OK, but when I QSYed to 20M I
finally looked at my power meter.  So I took about 25 mins to readjust
the bracket and stingers until I was getting good SWR around the contest
frequencies.  

I began to wonder if this was a sign of things to come, but from that
point on the contest went well.  Even after dark I didn't get lost...
which was a new experience!

The contest turned out to be all fun after that; even worked a couple of
European stations on 40M after the other bands faded.  Still need Jackson
for my last IL county!

Now back to the log work!

73, Norm, W3DYA