[NLRS] ARRL Sep VHF W0AUS/R(W0ZQ) Rover LP

[Jon Platt]

Nice weather for roving this weekend albeit the cold front that went through on Friday had a negative affect on propagation.  I roved around the Winsted grid corner area on Saturday, EN35/25/24, then did the St. Charles grid corner area on Sunday, EN34/44/33/43.   I had at least two operational problems this time.  The first was that I kept blowing 30A fuses on one of my two 12vdc power lines from the car battery.  After replacing the fuse for the third time it dawned on me that I had set up my drive level from my FT897 to full power (50w) when I was using it for a different purpose before.  The FT897 feeds an old TE Systems brick.  After rolling back the 2m RF power from the FT897 to 10 watts the blown fuse problem went away.   The second problem that I was having is my 1296 transverter occasionally has some kind of oscillation.   To make matters worse, it radiates some spurs of some kind, even in receive, that raises the noise floor on 2m and hence my IF rigs for my 902 and 2304.  I did not discover this until Sunday morning when I turned the 1296 transverter off and the noise on 902 went away.  So, something else to fix.  Knowing this issue I was then able to then limp along on those bands by turning the 1296 transverter on and off.  The best propagation for me was Sunday morning working Bill, K0AWU, from Cannon Falls, EN34nl.  The path was about 190 miles but the signals on the UHF bands were huge, that was fun.  The other fun Q with Bill was 10GHz from EN25 where we were able to find a small rain cell over Lake Mille Lacs and work on rain scatter.  By Sunday afternoon the cool front was pushing that dry air in and propagation continued on a downward trend with some tremendous QSB at times.   To bad the contest wasn't the week before when we had the good tropo.  But in any case, it was fun to rove once again.  Thanks for all the Qs!
73, JonW0ZQ
Call: W0AUS/R
Operator(s): W0ZQ
Station: W0AUS/R

Class: Rover LP
Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
    6:  37    6
    2:  62    10
  222:  49    10
  432:  56    10
  903:  36    8
  1.2:  28    4
  2.3:    7    1
  3.4:          
  5.7:    7    1
  10G:  14    4
  24G:          
-------------------
Total:  296    61  Total Score = 37,393

Club: Northern Lights Radio Society


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/nlrs/attachments/20220913/31f13751/attachment.html>