[NLRS] June VHF W0ZF/R

[Dave Fugleberg]

Was good to get out in the rover again. First rove with the new truck, so a
few items had to be changed.
On the bright side, most everything worked pretty well, and the weather was
good. Kinda windy,but that keeps the bugs away.

On the bad side, the TE Systems amp for 2 meters developed some serious
issues, and was basically unusable.  Ended up shutting it off and going
barefoot out of the transverter (around 4 watts).  Thanks to those who
worked me on 2m - you did all the heavy lifting.

I also managed to bust the connector off of my USB extender cable right
where it goes into the laptop.  Was able to move the external sound
card/USB hub combo close enough to plug its USB pigtail directly into the
laptop so I could keep going.

I met up with K0BBC/R at the start of the contest and ran a couple of
corners with him. We had FM HTs for 222 and 902, so those additional
contacts helped boost the score a bit.  Thanks Matt for the place to stay
in SD Saturday night and for being the other half of the rover pack.

About half of my contacts were 6m USB, which was fun - I was afraid
everyone would be on FT8, but an opening on Saturday evening and a lot of
Es on Sunday got the people out on SSB and CW.  The P3 looked like a 20m
contest at times.  I was able to fill a promised meteor scatter sked early
Sunday morning from EN14, and made a couple more MSK144 contacts as well -
Thanks Jim for your coaching to help me figure out what settings I had
wrong at 0530 local Sunday to make that happen.

I don't usually rove solo, so that was a big adjustment. The operating
position is in the back seat of a crew cab, so no ops while driving. That,
coupled with using the truck as a rotor, means a LOT of jumping in and out
of the vehicle to switch between the driving and operating seats.  I might
need to come up with a better arrangement.

I hated to stop on Sunday evening when 6m was still cooking, but wanted to
get home at a reasonable hour, so headed home and made a few Qs for my last
grid in the driveway.

        Band   Mode  QSOs     Pts  Grd  Pt/Q
          14  CW       1       1    1   1.0
          50  CW       1       1    0   1.0
          50  FT8      6       6    6   1.0
          50  MSK1     3       3    3   1.0
          50  USB     75      75   40   1.0
         144  CW       5       5    1   1.0
         144  FM       1       1    1   1.0
         144  USB     16      16    5   1.0
         222  FM      12      24    4   2.0
         420  CW       1       2    1   2.0
         420  USB     14      28    5   2.0
         902  FM      12      36    4   3.0
        1240  USB     12      36    4   3.0
       Total  Both   159     234   75   1.5

Claimed Score - 17,550
73 de W0ZF