[NLRS] KC0LBT/R Summary

[John Hoaglun]

The contest was a blast. Here is a summary:

We started out the contest late... this was kind of expected no matter how
hard we worked before the contest. We ended up getting on the road about 2
hours late. (Broke an important rule there.... be at the first stop when the
contest begins.)

We drove through light rain the entire way to our first stop in the SE
corner of EN44. We setup only to discover that there was virtually no one
calling CQ.  We heard a couple of stations... tried to work them only to the
have rain start getting really close. We decided that we would pack up and
move on or get hit by more rain. We decided to scrap our next 2 stops as
well since it was raining. (This area is pretty hill covered with decent
size trees so we decided that we wouldn't  lose many q's by going
further down the road.)

We drove to Madison and parked in an office parking lot on a decent hill. We
setup to work in the rain which started shortly after we arrived Our first
qso was around 16:28. We heard some local traffic and a bit stuff in the
Chicago/Rockford area. We worked for about 90 minutes until we stopped
hearing any new calls.  We then packed up, picked up dinner, some gas, and
drove towards Rockford.

Some place between Madison and Rockford we drove out of the rain and it
warmed up a bit. Stopped at the first exit on the north side of Rockford.
Our first QSO was around 20:18. This was a nice site about 3 minutes off of
the interstate in a large field.  We worked from this site for about 90
minutes. This area has good potential and would be a good area to either
start or end the contest. It was quite and had good paths in all directions.
We worked in Michigan and EN34 among other places.

Next we hit the road and tried to decide if we should work the next couple
of corners mobile to try to get to our hotel room in Cedar Rapids at semi
decent time or to make a few more stops. We decided to drive through until
we got a bit greedy. We heard some stations calling CQ on 2m ssb with our
vertical on top of the truck. We decide to pull over for a few minutes...
bought some gas and a coke (need to stay awake on the road somehow.)  We
found a corn field with a nice road on the side that we could pull into
across from a park. We setup and started calling CQ and picked up a some
more Q's. A local deputy sheriff stopped by and hung out with us for a
little while. Once exhausted the stations that were awake we packed up and
hit the road. (I have some pictures from this site that I will post in a few
days.)

We kept the 706' tuned to 144.200 and started working mobile on the vertical
as drove towards Cedar Rapids. We ended working a few stations on 2m ssb, 6m
ssb, and 432fm of the roof top antennas across EN42, and EN41. N0URW kept us
company was drove and we kept pushing up his mult as we moved. We drove
little out of the way to get an extra grid. We ended up arriving at our
hotel around 4:15am. (ok... we were only about 4 hours behind schedule at
this point.... we had crossed 4 states in one day and even managed to get a
couple of points.)

The hotel which we had reservations at did not hold our room for us. We had
a credit card hold on the room and had set it up with a late check-in....
they knew that we would be there well after midnight. The hotel was booked
up. After a lot of yelling on my part they found us a nice room. Needless to
say we slept in past the wake-up call.

We started late on Sunday morning. We stop in the western side of EN41 to
push up the q's in that area since we only had a couple from the over night
trip.  We moved west down US30 about 2000 feet and activated EN31.  Sunday
was a beautiful day to operate a rover station outside. We worked here for
about an hour.

We drove west on US30 to EN32 outside of Nevada, Iowa. I let Ian (KC0ITQ)
operate the radio and computer for a while so that I could snap some
pictures of the rover configuration next to the cornfields. Ian worked Mike
KM0T and some other stations. (KM0T is a great sounding station and a great
operator. He knows all of the tricks to pull stations out of the noise. It
was fun to listen to Mike and Ian work while took pictures.) We worked here
for
about 40 minutes. People were starting push us to move and light up some
more grids.

We decided to change our plans and go west into EN22 for a few minutes. We
worked here for more than 40 minutes and decided to move.

It was around 6:30pm and we needed some gas and food. We drove north on
highway
169 and picked up our supplies.  We toyed with idea of going north a bit
more
and working from EN23 for a few minutes but decided that we needed to start
driving north. Both of us had to be to work on Monday morning and we had a
long trip to go.

We worked KA0PQW (EN33) in several grids including EN33, and EN34. Matt
really
helped us out.... we made the Q's with the verticals on the truck running
SSB.
Matt turned out to be a great mult for us.


Number of Grids Worked: 21
Number Grids Activated: 10
Total Mults: 31
Total Q's: 118
Total Q Points: 135
----------------------------------------
Claimed Score: 4185

50        22 contacts
144      79 contacts
222        2 contacts
432      15 contacts

Grids Activated: (In Order)
EN53, EN52, EN51, EN42, EN41, EN31, EN32, EN22, EN33, EN34

Operators: KC0ITQ & KC0LBT



I am already working on getting the 222 and 432 systems upgraded. I plan to
have
100w on those bands. I am probably going to move to a 5 element 6m beam as
well.
I also plan to add some stacked halos to the truck. I want use to be able to
work
all 4 bands ssb horizontal polarization while we are mobile. We could have
easily doubled our tripled the amount of q's that we worked. We spent too
much
time driving and too little time on the air.

There are lots of simple changes that we will make before the next contest.
It was
a blast. We will be rovering again with a bigger and better station.

73

John Hoaglun - MCSE
KC0LBT - EN35
http://www.hoaglun.com