[NLRS] W0JT in 2006-September VHF Contest (long)

[John P. Toscano]

After having missed a couple of earlier VHF contests this year, when 
propagation was reporedly awesome, I managed to work this contest, and 
found that conditions were anything but awesome.  (Hello, Murphy!)

At times, I had problems working a few folks only one grid away, yet at 
other times I easily completed on 2M with stations in southern Iowa and 
Missouri. I even heard a station in Nebraska, but could not get his 
attention before he jumped to another band.  Go figure.  They weren't 
loud like on tropo, but were well above my noise floor.  Maybe it has to 
do with less noise in that direction (south from Apple Valley), or maybe 
Murphy was busy dropping in for a brief visit with one of you, and was 
unable to stay by my side every minute of the contest.  I dunno.

High points:
   1) Getting a little more confortable using CW on tough contacts.  I
      think this was the first contest ever where *I* was the one that
      actually suggested trying CW.  In the past, it's mainly been a case
      where the other station dragged me that way.  To those of you on
      the other end of those QSO's, thanks for your patience with my
      wobbly "fist", especially on 902 & 1296 where I had to use the
      straight key instead of the paddles.  Practice makes perfect, and
      alas, time to practice is a scarce commodity for me these days.

   2) Working the rovers on at least some of the bands in some of their
      grids.  When I originally saw W9FZ's posting of his rover route,
      I mentally wrote him off as being too far away, and late in the
      contest, I stumbled across him by accident in EN54.  Worked him
      there and two other grids, and kicked myself for not looking for
      him earlier.

   3) Working N9TTX in EN44 on 1296, even though I was struggling to get
      out on 902 & 1296 in this contest.  Early on, N0KP had a hard time
      hearing me (only 20 Km away from me!) on 902 & 1296, so I knew that
      things were going to be tough on the high bands for the rest of the
      contest, but fortunately we tried this one anyway, and succeeded.

Low points:
   1) Not discovering until late Saturday night that due to a stupidly
      erroneous mouse click by me at the start of the contest, all of
      my log entries on Saturday were recorded with a time of 0000 UTC.
      (The software got set accidentally to manual time entry instead of
      reading the system clock.  Uff da!)  Looks like, at best, I might
      be able to send it in as a check log, but maybe not even that if
      it could penalize any of the folks I worked on Saturday.  I'll be
      checking with the Contest Branch before I send anything in.  After
      discovering my major goof, I decided to continue to work the
      contest as if nothing had happened, since, for me, it's more
      important to get the chance to get a good dose of RF periodically
      than winning wallpaper (though I do have a couple of pieces).  And
      if I could contribute some more points to someone in contention for
      an award, so much the better.  I guess I did throttle back my
      intensity a little bit, and even went to bed for a few zzzz's
      instead of staying up all through the night hunting for an elusive
      contact here & there.

   2) After getting a lot of help from Phil, KB0NES, to get a pair of
      PyroJoseph amplifiers for 2304 and 3456 mounted onto adequate
      heat sinks, having work and family committments prevent me from
      getting either band hooked up and on the air.  So many projects,
      so little time.  Even a few QSO's on those bands would have made
      a significant contribution to my score.

   3) Twice during the contest, for reasons yet unknown to me, the 13.8
      volt power supply out in the garage that runs the remotely-located
      902 & 1296 transverters stopped making power.  Fortunately, the
      arrangement I use to switch between the transverters has status
      LED's in the shack that are powered from the remote supply, so I
      could see that the DC was gone from down there.  Of course, I
      didn't notice that until it was time to make a QSO on one of those
      bands and heard nothing but noise, so that required a quick run
      upstairs and out to the garage to cycle the AC to the power supply,
      then a quick run back downstairs and a hurried (and out of breath)
      apology to the station trying to work me.

Final results, which are pretty much irrelevant since I trashed my log:

CATEGORY: SINGLE-OP ALL LOW
CLAIMED-SCORE: 12528
OPERATORS: W0JT
CLUB: NORTHERN LIGHTS RADIO SOCIETY
STATION LOCATION: EN34js

Band    QSOs    Grids    Q Points
   50     29       10         29
  144     62       16         62
  222     21       10         42
  432     33       13         66
  902      5        2         15
1296      6        3         18
Totals  156       54    x   232   = 12,528

Even though I got poor performance from 902 & 1296, my score would have 
only been 9,751 without those two bands, so I guess it was worth having 
them available.  Two meters remained the workhorse, and 432 was a very 
strong band.  (Hard to imagine that 10 years ago I thought that 
frequency was too high to travel very far!)  The 222 band was a great 
asset, and it seems that more folks are realizing that and adding it to 
their stations.  If there was any enhancement of propagation on 6M, I 
sure missed it.  Making more QSO's on 432 than on 50 is a sign of that.

Now, to get ready for weekend two of the 10 GHz contest (after missing 
the first weekend this year for my daughter's wedding and visits with 
all the out of town guests).

73 de W0JT