[ILQSO] K9NT/N9PCS portable operation

[Paul Zerkel]

As last year we once again operated from the Painter Pond picnic area
inside Jim Edgar Panther Creek State Fish & Wildlife Area. This site is
located entirely inside Cass county. So we were "single-county"
portable.

I know the rules do not favor this kind of a "single-county portable"
station. But I wonder why more people who just want to have fun and
don't really care about a big score (I can't be the only one like that)
don't do this. Especially from one of the "rarer" counties. I see a lot
of the counties south of I-72 were covered only by mobiles. I know all
of those counties have at least one public park in them. Those parks
generally have at least one shelter, some kind of bathrooms, often a
place to build a fire. All of those things make it much easier for the
XYL to consider coming out and maybe even cooking for the operators!
Plus these sites usually have enough trees to hang some kind of antenna,
and they do not require permission from land-owners to use!

Our site did not have electricity, but that made the noise floor
relatively low and a deep cycle battery provided plenty of power for our
radio and computer.

We had a 40m and 20m antenna. We had planned on bringing an 80m antenna
but after seeing the forecast, we decided that we did not want to stay
out in the cold long enough for 80 to come alive. We also discovered a
problem with our 20m antenna, so did not get on 20 either. Obviously in
this contest if you are only going to have one band, 40m is the one to
have.

The station was a Kenwood TS-B2000, and a Dell laptop running Kenwood's
ARCP-2000 rig control software, MixW (for help decoding CW), and logging
with a home-grown Access database. The laptop was powered from a 12v car
adapter. CW was sent using K9NT's memory keyer. I considered using MixW
to send CW, but Bob K9NT was the much more experienced CW op and he was
more familiar with his equipment than my MixW program. CW was mostly
decoded by K9NT's brain. I was trying to use my brain, but ended up
using the MixW crutch most of the time.

OK It was COLD! We had built a small fire in the grill, and had a small
propane heater going, and had put up a tarp across a couple of shelter
supports to try to get a windbreak. It helped but was not enough, by
3:00 my fingers could hardly type to log and K9NT could hardly run the
paddle, so we started packing up.

Thanks to more of this year's QSO's being CW, we managed to beat our
2005 score, despite fewer multipliers. We were pleased with that.

This is one of the few contests that I truly enjoy. I don't know if we
will do the same thing next year. But I am sure I will participate in
some manner. I am trying to convince the contest sponsors to allow
wet-borders. If that were to happen, I believe a maritime-mobile op from
the Illinois River could be great fun. We'll see.

Here are the rather meager results from our 2006 IQP operation.

CW QSOs: 23
PH QSOs: 17
IL counties: 27
States: 7
DX: 1

Congratulations to WIARC for succesfully running their first IQP!

73,
Paul, N9PCS