[PaQSO] Blunder stories

[wa2fgk at ezlinx.net]

Maybe we should play, "Can You Top This"
The station we put together for our little multi op experience is seldom
used. Although we thought we had a decent setup for 20 meters to use as
the base with a 2 element quad at 80 feet.. Then a few dipoles would be
the easy part.
On Saturday evening I was the only operator left after 9:30 local. So I
stopped operating CW and switched to 80 meters. I tuned up the pair of
3-500's and noticed that when the drive was all the way down on the Yaesu
radio, I was still running high power. I then checked the SWR quickly and
that was pretty low. It turns out the antenna tuner has two positions and
it was in the low power position. So half of the contest was run at 100
watts out of our KW amp.. I guess it proved that antennas are the most
important part of the contest station.
I then found a clear frequency and pumped the power to a cool KW and had
runs of 100 per hour for quite some time on Saturday evening.
The other strange thing was receiving a phone call from a friend wanting
to tell me about his experience. While he was operating on Saturday
afternoon, he noticed his SWR jumping. He had an auto tuner on his rig,
and it kept cleaning the SWR up. He took a break right before dark on
Saturday afternoon and looked up at his dipole and it was not there. It
turns out for several days prior to the contest we had 45 mph winds and
his dipole had broken. What amazed him was working stations with a broken
antenna.. I guess it was some sort of "GROUND WAVE".
Well that's all I heard so far from the Murgas ARC.
Another great reason to operate contests is being able to tell stories for
years to come
Thanks everyone
Herb at K3 Yellow Traffic Light