[NLRS] N9DG Jan VHF SS

[Duane - N9DG]

Well that was another tough January contest. Conditions here
were mostly poor to maybe average with a few short periods of
enhancements. All in all participation seemed down
significantly from here. I'm sure that the HF contest and the
silly football playoffs took their toll on participation as
well.

Murphy struck right out of the gate when I discovered I had
next to 0 power out on 2M just before the contest. I spent
better part of an hour and half T-shooting it. I swapped IF
radios, attenuators, transverter, cables, - and still no
power. I finally noticed that the power setting in the N4PY
control program barely advanced above 2 (out of a total range
of 100). I then tried rolling back software versions to no
avail. I did finally work around it by switching away from 2M
and then back again, the control then went as high as it
should for the transverter TX drive (12). So I thought I
found the problem and then put the original transverter back,
- and oh no, - no power again. As it turns out I had two
separate but nearly simultaneous failures, one was software,
and one was hardware. So I ended up running with the backup
transverter. The bad part about running with the backup
transverter is that it uses a 26 MHz IF, so because of that I
didn't have my sub RX for 2M since the sub RX IF radio can't
go much below 28 MHz. And boy did I really miss the sub RX.
So I basically lost the first 45 minutes of the contest to
T-shooting. And as luck would have it I can't reproduce the
software problem anymore. I haven't looked at the HW problem
yet to see what happened. 

So with all that behind me I was off and running. And the Q's
were piling up at a good clip for the next 2 hours or so.
Then it was as if someone turned off the switch, where did
everyone go??? The rest of Saturday evening was pretty flat.
I hit the rack around 11P and got up again ~6:30 ish. Well
that was pretty much a waste of time, I only worked one new
one for nearly two more hours. The rest of Sunday was slow;
the Sunday afternoon "doldrums" were not that much worse than
the rest of the day. Then again later in the evening the
typical big rush of "late in the contest point-hander-outers"
never materialized like they usually do (I'll blame the
football games for that).

And Murphy punched me some more where I had two spontaneous
computer reboots over the course of the contest. Each of them
takes me off the air for 5-10 minutes to reboot and
reconfigure. I never had this problem with the machine I had
before the one I have now. Grrrr!! And of course I can't have
a contest without some lengthy periods of power line noise,
more or less made my 210-240 SW unusable for all of Saturday
and also Sunday morning.

The only rovers I worked were N0DQS/R in EN22 and WB8BZK/R
when he was somewhat closer to me. And I worked N9UX/R just
once. I did however hear K9JK/R a few times but just couldn't
get his attention and WB8BZK/R a few other times and couldn't
get his attention those times either.

There was also a disproportionately high rate of stations
heard but not worked this time. I'll blame the conditions for
that. I heard a couple people work K2YAZ but never heard him
myself. I heard K8TQK a couple times but no luck working him
either. Missed W9RVG completely if he even made it on. My
benchmark station to the West is KM0T; those Q's were
definitely harder than normal to make. I was hearing into the
Milwaukee and Chicago areas pretty OK but it sure seemed like
that those folks would not look to the W or NW very much.
Other than having N9UDO pop in there on and off; and the
N9UHF group being close by it was really pretty dogone lonely
out here in Western EN53 land.

I did catch a handful of 6M Es Q's but nothing that would
really boost my numbers much. And yet once again EN44 was
well represented, bravo. I did pick up W0VB, W0ZQ, N0KP (one
of my computer crashes happened just as he was coming around
to work me), W0GHZ and N0VZJ (another benchmark station for
me) to my NW. There were also a couple others up that way as
well. All in all I think conditions might have been just a
bit better to my NW than to my E/SE.

Here are the numbers, they pretty well sum up the conditions,
the Q numbers are downright flat and the grid counts are all
off a bit from what I normally expect.

50 MHz         61       27
144 MHz        74       29
222 MHz        33       18
432 MHz        40       19

             208        93       26133  Claimed

Badger Contesters - SOLP

Duane
N9DG

EN53bj  (The part that is 90 miles WEST of Milwaukee)



 
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