[PaQSO] Blunder stories

[John Myers]

  guys, I hate to say it, but I can top

On 10/17/09, wa2fgk at ezlinx.net <wa2fgk at ezlinx.net> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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