[NLRS] W0JT/R in January 2013 VHF Contest

[tosca005 at umn.edu]

Short version:

Band   QSO's   Points  Grids
 50       8       8      4
144      30      30      6
Total    38      38     10 + 8 grids activated = 18

Grand total = 38 x 18 = 684 points


Long version:

I left most of my ham gear back in Minnesota for the summer contest season 
since I still spend summers there. But I figured I'd participate in the 
January VHF contest in some manner down here in Texas.

Thanks to the restrictive covenants of the Homeowner's Association (HOA) 
where my daughter and son-in-law bought their home (where my wife and I 
live most of the year since we retired), I have not yet managed to put up 
any ourdoor antennas, so operating as a fixed station is problematic. 
Roving seemed to be a viable alternative, but I did not bring along any 
roving antennas.

Jim (K0MHC) encouraged me to go out roving for the contest, and even loaned 
me antennas for 144 and 432 MHz. I'd have to come up with my own 6M 
antenna.

I've been thinking for awhile about what would make a good rover antenna 
for 50 MHz. I have frequently been annoyed when working a rover from my 
home that had good signals on every band except 6M where they only brought 
along a dipole. A full-size yagi for 6 meters is wider than the 
street-legal vehicle width (102") allowed in either Texas or Minnesota, so 
I wanted something smaller but with some gain and directivity. I started 
investigating the 6 meter quad, which eliminates the problem of antenna 
width and provides the directionality desired. I went through a few 
iterations with Jerry, K0CQ of a variety of quad designs. A standard 
"cubical" quad would be about 5 feet wide and 5 feet high, and mast height 
is also at a premium in a rover situation, so I explored "squashed" 
(rectangular) quads that were no more than 8 feet wide and therefore only 
about 2 feet high. I picked a design that seemed like it was promising, but 
as I started to gather materials and visualized just how big this antenna 
would be, I balked at the size and the cost.

Then I got interested in an enhanced version of the Moxon. The standard 
Moxon is only 2 elements, the DE and the reflector, but I found some plans 
for 4 and even 6-element Moxon designs. In case you are not familiar with 
the Moxon, it has some similarity to the traditional yagi but the ends of 
the elements are bent at 90 degrees to the main part of the element, either 
forwards or backwards (parallel to the boom if there is one), and this 
solves the problem of the maximum allowable vehicle width. I settled on the 
GW3YDX design:

http://zs6wr.co.za/antennas/super%20moxon.pdf

I built mine out of soft copper tubing instead of hard copper pipe or the 
aluminum tubing specified by the author due to my unfamiliarity with local 
sources for less-common building supplies. Since soft copper tubing is, 
well, SOFT, I reinforced the tubing with oak wooden dowels in an attempt to 
keep the pieces as straight and aligned as possible.

Via an attachment to my car's roof rack, I mounted seven feet of rigid iron 
pipe as my vertical mast. (One 4 foot piece and one 3 foot piece with 
back-to-back pipe flanges joining them and serving as an attachment point 
for guy ropes). I figured that the roof rack was about 6 feet above ground 
level (AGL) and with 7 feet of mast the top would be about 13 feet AGL. The 
maximum allowable vehicle height in Texas without a special permit is 14 
feet so I figured I would be good as gold, even though the top of the mast 
was actually at 13'6" after taking into account the way the mast was 
attached to the roof rack.

So I put the "super Moxon" at the top of the mast at 13.5 feet AGL, and 
below that I put a non-conductive cross-boom (PVC pipe reinforced with oak 
closet rod) to hold the 144 and 432 MHz antennas loaned to me by K0MHC. The 
144 MHz antenna is a Directive Systems rover antenna (6 elements on an 8 
foot boom) and the 432 MHz antenna is a monstrous home-brewed antenna that 
Jim has used for 432 MHz EME in the past. These two antennas were placed 
side-by-side, about 2.5 feet below the 50 MHz antenna, or at about 11 feet 
AGL.

Our plan was to start in EM01 and drive nortwward on Highway 281, picking 
up grids EM02, EM03, and EM04 on Saturday; overnight in Ardmore Oklahoma; 
and follow Interstate 35 south on Sunday, activating grids EM14, EM13, 
EM12, EM11, EM10, the corner of EL19, and EL09. I would then head for home 
in San Antonio (EL09ro) and Jim would head for Kerrville with or without 
further stops / grids as the situation allowed.

There is only one way out of the neighborhood where I live (gated 
community), and on the way out I had yet more reason to curse the HOA. They 
don't bother to keep the foliage trimmed to allow a street-legal vehicle to 
pass through. Although I didn't hear any loud collisions with overhead 
branches on my way out of the neighborhood (about 2 miles to expressway 
Loop 1604), I could tell I was hitting something, and by the time I reached 
the highway, the shadow of my antennas on the ground told me I was in 
trouble. I pulled off right away. The 6 meter antenna was shredded. The 
impacts with the tree branches had twisted the mast so that the antennas 
were now sideways, aided no doubt by the extreme length of the 432 antenna 
and its resultant torque on the mast. So I turned around and headed for 
home to salvage what I could.

I replaced the broken wooden support dowels in the 6 meter antenna and bent 
the elements back into place, hoping that would suffice to get it working 
properly. I decided to remove the overly-large 432 antenna, eliminate the 
cross-boom, and put the 144 antenna on the same mast as the 50 MHz antenna. 
I moved the 6M antenna down to about 11 feet AGL and the 2M antenna down to 
about 9 feet AGL. I hoped that this configuration would survive another 
trip through the folliage-laden neighborhood. By the time the repairs and 
re-configuration were done, I was seriously behind schedule. Instead of 
trying to catch up to K0MHC as he roved up EM01-EM04, I made a beeline for 
Ardmore OK as fast as I dared, making no contacts at all on the way, and 
reaching the hotel where he was staying around midnight. I set my alarm for 
6 AM and got a few hours sleep, figuring to salvage at least the Sunday run 
back down I35.

At the first stop in EM14 I struggled to work stations in the next grid 
over (EM13, less than 100 miles away). At one point Jim relayed to me that 
the other station was not hearing anything at all from me on 2M, and on a 
wild hunch, I turned off the 2M amplifier. Now I was weak but clearly 
audible. So apparently the 2M brick that was supposed to boost me to 170 
watts was not even letting the radio's native 20-30 watts get out. So 2 
meters was going to have to be a near-QRP exercise. Meanwhile, there was no 
separate amplifier involved on 6M, the radio's native output should have 
been 100 watts, implying that the antenna was performing poorly. I guess 
it's like they say, "if it wasn't for bad luck I wouldn't have any luck at 
all".

By tail-ending on Jim's 2M and 6M QSO's, I was able to connect with a 
decent percentage of the people he worked on those two bands from each of 
the grids that we operated from. Otherwise, I suspect I'd have a nearly 
empty log, since none of the contacts were particularly easy. I didn't even 
bother to bring along my Bencher paddles because they had been damaged in 
the move down from Minnesota to Texas and were not usable, but they sure 
would have helped to make a few more QSO's in marginal cases.

My thanks go out to K0MHC/R for encouraging me to come out in the first 
place, and to all those operators that struggled to work me in spite of my 
puny signal. I particularly have to thank K5LLL, the only station to work 
me in all 8 grids that I activated, always on 2M and usually on 6M also.

I arrived home in San Antonio around 9 PM and went almost immediately to 
bed, exhausted from the trip. Monday morning I was put on notice that I had 
to get the antennas off the car because my wife needed to take the car out 
on errands. Oh, the lot of the rover can be such a challenge! I did delay 
just long enough to do a few tests. The problem on 2M now appears to have 
been related to inadequate DC power to the brick, because I had no 
difficulty getting it to put out 150 watts in my driveway with the brick 
connected almost directly to the rover battery. The problem on 6M is 
clearly with the antenna, as it measured an SWR of 5:1 and my 100 watt 
radio folded back to only 10 watts due to the poor match. Oh well, another 
problem to debug and fix for next time.

Anyway, if you participated at all, please be sure to send in a log, even 
if it is small, to show that there is still an interest in VHF & up 
contesting. And if you did NOT participate at all, please consider doing so 
in the future!

73 de John P. Toscano, W0JT/5
EL09ro October-May
EN34js May-September

P.S., my original 14-foot design height was a bad idea, notwithstanding my 
beef with the HOA. Driving up to Ardmore, I passed under several bridges 
near Austin that, with no advanced warning, posted height limits of 13'9" 
and 13'7" -- if I had been at 14 feet height I would not have been able to 
stop in time to avoid a collision, and would have had no way off the 
expressway to go around them! Bad design by the Texas highway department if 
you ask me!

/jpt/