[PVRCNC] 2026 CQ WPX SSB SOSB10 LP - K4TMC

[Henry Pollock - K4TMC]

Call: K4TMC

Operator(s): K4TMC

Station: K4TMC

Class: SOSB10 LP

Class Overlay: Unassisted

QTH: NC - FM14pq

Operating Time (hrs): 22.5



Summary:

 Band  QSOs

------------

  160:    0

   80:    0

   40:    0

   20:    0

   15:    0

   10:  294

------------

Total:  294    Prefixes = 242    Total Score = 190,212



Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club



Comments:

Portable operation from Atlantic Beach, NC (Bogue Banks), Grid FM14pq, IOTA
NA-112, USI NC010S

The continuing saga of an old-one-man portable beach contest expedition.
This episode is longer, thanks to the evil Wind Gods.

This trip started out great; Zoe (dog) and I were finally able to get to
the beach sand dune site on Wednesday afternoon which allowed for a more
slower-paced station setup. The XYL stayed home this time. I was rested and
woke up at 7am Thursday morning, started a pot of fresh-ground bean coffee
and took Zoe on a walk around the neighborhood. Spent the morning getting
the BuddiHex frame and its associated support mast partially assembled,
adding 10M 4 element super light weigh aluminum (0.014” wall) elements, and
then getting the assembly erected on the house’s 2nd floor rear deck. This
should be easy, however, the deck is only 12 ft wide and there is a 2.5 ft
overhang of the above roof, and the aluminum elements are subject to easy
damage if they hit anything. I think I will dub this antenna the ‘Fragile
Yagi’. But, I do gain an extra 9 ft of antenna height which makes up for
the loss of 2 sections of the MastWerks 10M telescopic mast. Luckily, I got
this done before the afternoon winds arrived, with gusts in the 20’s mph. I
rewarded myself and dog Zoe with a lunch trip to our favorite smoked
brisket shack. Spent the afternoon erecting the two BlueSky masts for the
6-element rope boom yagi in the back yard, and after dinner, I prepared the
ropes and telescopic whip elements for the yagi raising, which occurred
Friday morning. I checked into the Thursday afternoon HFQSO 10M net to see
how the new yagi was performing. My wife luckily picked the right time to
stay home, as I discovered Thursday afternoon that the home’s AC and great
room TV were not working. Friday morning arrived with even more wind;
frequent gusts approaching 30mph. Attached feedline and raised the
6-element yagi with no issues. Then proceeded to erect a fiberglass
telescopic pole to support a 10M end fed half wave vertical on the other
end of the deck. To keep it from whipping around too much, I lowered it and
added a guy ring and some guys to maintain stability, before raising back
to almost full height. So by 1pm, I was ready…time for a nap! By
mid-afternoon CY0S was creating a pileup on 28.450, but I could not hear
them even with the 6-ele yagi!

Friday afternoon before the contest, 10M was fairly active with strong
signals from the West Coast, Central & South America, New Zealand and some
CT and EA stations. By 2200, things had dried up, with one strong LU2. I
had a nice rag chew with a California station who was the loudest signal on
the band using an 80M loop at 130 ft high. When the contest started, the
band exploded with dozens of stations. The band died at 0125 and I finished
the evening with 31 QSOs and 27 mults, including an all-time-new-one, VK9.
This is not quite as good as the 2023 effort where I finished with 39 QSOs
in the same time.

Overnight the winds increased and I was awoken at 1030Z with strange noises
on the roof outside. Imagine my surprise when I realized it was not
December 25th. Opened the back door to the deck and there were pieces of
the Fragile Yagi laying around on the deck and hanging over the roof’s
edge. The MastWerks mast was bowed over such that the BuddiHex frame was
laying on the roof. The other two antennas survived and upon examination I
only found one loose guy stake for the rope boom yagi support mast. I had
to wait until a band of rain passed through later in the morning, which
calmed the winds somewhat, to spend about an hour getting the BuddiHex
frame and yagi disassembled into a safe condition. Amazingly, the aluminum
elements survived for another day. The only casualties were one broken
spreader arm joint coupler and the bowed mast. It was too windy to attempt
assembly and erection of the 2nd BuddiHex with the bent wire 4-element yagi
and its 7 meter MastWerks mast. Even other 4 & 5-element yagis and support
masts that were in storage would have been dangerous to attempt assembly
and safe erection by one person in the windy conditions. Lesson
learned…have a backup antenna prepped for quick assembly and potential
erection.

On Saturday the band was slow to open, not making the first Europe contact
until 1230Z and the others were slow to pop up out of the noise for the
next hours. Later in the day there were some really loud stations, TM1C was
frequently S9-20+, but not as many as in recent past 10M conditions.
Contacts toward S & C America were prevalent, however, I was now limited to
using the EFHW vertical for those. I did work a ZP5 QRP station fairly
easily. In the afternoon I worked KH8 for another ATNO along with KH6 and
several VKs; never heard any JAs. I worked the last EU (PI4) way up the
band at 2100Z and spent the rest of the night working a lot of weak S & C
Americans and stateside stations until 0030 when the band died. I never was
able to get any decent runs going even when the band was open to EU, so it
was S&P for 98% of the time. Finished the evening with 219 QSOs and 181
Mults. Not where I wanted to be versus the last time, 247 QSOs back in 2023.

Sunday morning found the winds more normal. I extended the telescopic pole
supporting the EFHW to it’s maximum height putting the end of the wire at
43 ft AGL. I also tightened the rope boom yagi support ropes to bring the
array to a flatter configuration, maybe squeezing out some fraction of a dB
more gain. Just as Saturday morning, the band opened at 1230 but only with
a few loud EU and SA stations, which I had already worked the previous day.
Unlike yesterday, there seemed to be more rapid and slow fading on the few
new stations that I attempted to work, and it seemed that they were not
hearing US stations. Finally got a YU0 at 1344. Wow, I was shocked to find
CY0S strong at S5 and worked them at 1415 with one call, no ‘up’ shift,  and
no pileup! The EU stations that were strong still could not hear me. Things
faded out around 1500, but then shot up around 1630 with very strong EU
signals, which then faded away again after an hour. By 1830 the band was
mostly dead again except for a few stations. So I parked at a spot and
turned on the auto-repeat CQ message and over the next hour picked up 11
more QSOs and 8 mults. In conclusion, this was not a repeat of the 2023
effort, where I had several hours of nice runs into Europe. This time it
was a hard slog of slow S&P tuning of the VFO listening to every new signal
and trying for a contact. There were a lot of “who’s the Kilo 4…or who’s
the ending Charlie”. As a result, it was even a slow S&P rate.

The next potential sand dune effort will probably be the July IOTA Contest.
Hopefully, the AC will be fixed by then.

Rig: Elecraft K3+ with Heil HC-4 mic element

Antennas: 4 element 10M yagi on BuddiHex Beam frame at 34 ft AGL (Friday
night only); 6 element 10M rope boom yagi fixed to Europe at 30 ft AGL; PAR
EF10 on 34 ft fiberglass pole, top at 43 ft AGL; Ground level (top of sand
dune) is 15 ft ASL.



73,

Henry – K4TMC