[NLRS] KC9JTL and the contest

[David Palm]

Hello all,

We scrambled to get some antennas up for 222 and 432 and got on the air just
twenty minutes into the contest.  Unfortunately, we found early on that 432
was a bust.  I don't know if it's the rig, the feedline, or the antenna.
SWR seemed fine, rig said it was putting out full power, but nobody could
hear us and we couldn't hear them.  So the only 440 contacts we got were
local FM stuff.

222 worked okay, but I'm still not satisfied with that one either.  What we
have is better than nothing, but it just seems like there's so much more
potential on that band.  We're going to have to work on really shoring up
the 222 and 432 for this summer.

But speaking of local FM contacts, we got quite a few, which was great.  Our
local club members really came out to help us.  And quite a few other locals
in a larger radius got on the air, both on FM and on SSB.  So that was nice
to hear.

I still have some line noise here, so unfortunately there are folks who can
hear me, but I can't hear them.  I really need to try to get on that this
spring.  (Sorry to W9GA that we just couldn't make it work on 6 meters at
the end of the contest.)

Basement flooded overnight (!) so we spent part of Sunday morning bailing
out.  So by the time we cleaned up, went to church, ate, etc. we had eaten
up a large part of Sunday.  So we didn't get quite as much air time as we
might have wanted.

Still, our tally was as follows:

               QSOs    Grid
50              27          9
144            52          14
222            9             6
440            5             1

That's almost twice as many contacts as we got last January, which was our
first VHF-UHF contest.

Thanks to all and 73,

David (W9HQ) and Christopher (KC9JTL)