Needing a break, the XYL and I went to a movie on Saturday afternoon.  I started again at 5 P.M., and operated until about 10.  I was pretty wiped out by then, and took a nap for an hour with my clothes on.  I got up raring to go,  happily contemplating the thought of doing an all-nighter.  The XYL said, "Your antenna is down!"  We had a heavy, wet snowstorm that weekend, and, after being up for three years, the G5RV came down.  Five minutes later, the power went out.  It stayed off until 3 P.M. the next day.  By that time, I was thoroughly convinced that the Contest Gods did not intend me to operate any more in this contest.  I know when I'm beaten.
Well, I had 210 contacts and 37 multipliers for a score of 15,540 points.  Looking at last year's results in QST, that would put me somewhere in the lower middle of the pack.  However, everybody raved about the good DX last year, and I didn't hear any.  I don't think it was my antenna, because I didn't even hear anybody working DX.  My feeling is that the 1996 contest just had poorer conditions, so maybe I didn't do so badly after all.  Time will tell.  In any case I sure will be back on next year with a better antenna....  And, the 10 meter contest is coming soon, so I better get ready for that.

W.A.S. OSCAR

David Reinhart, WA6ILT

Logbooks are wonderful things.  There are hams who don't bother with them anymore, since the FCC stopped requiring that you log every contact.  However, I'm an "Old Timer", first licensed in 1969 when logs were still a holy document, and old habits are hard to break.
I closed out a logbook towards the end of 1994.  The last page of that log shows my first OSCAR satellite contact in August, via RS-10/11, one of the Russian satellites. The remaining few entries, through October, are also mostly satellite contacts.  They are fairly well spread out because I was still dealing with antenna problems.
Now let's jump ahead into my current log, about two years later. As you go through the pages, the vast majority of contacts you'll see are via a variety of  OSCARs.  On October 12, there is a triumphant note in the comments section of a QSO with N0NSV in Rugby,

North Dakota:  Last state for WAS OSCAR!
Getting to that last QSO was a lot of fun and a lot of aggravation.  I went though a lot of evolutions in equipment, especially antennas.  I started working RS-10 with a three element MFJ beam, rotating only in azimuth with no elevation tracking.  I use a G5RV with my TS-440S for the 10M downlink on the RS birds.  For about eight months, my two meter uplink radio was an old Kenwood multimode that Martin, AA1ON, lent to me.
I worked a lot of states on the RS birds.  One of my prize contacts was Washington State on RS-10.  It was a pass that was very low on my horizon, and I figure that our mutual window must have been about one minute long at most. 
When RS-15 went up in December of 1994, we Mode A operators had great hopes.  It has a much higher orbit than RS-10, giving it a much bigger "footprint", the area you can work on a given pass.  Also, being much higher, it was easier to cope with the Doppler effect, the frequency shift that fast moving satellites display.  We soon found out that the low power output of the satellite's transponder made it a tough bird to hear.  As tough as RS-15 could be, when it came time tally up my QSL cards for the WAS application, I was surprised how many of them came from RS-15 contacts.  Another case where learning new operating skills and improving the station payed off!
Looking toward the day that I'd have a radio to work the "high orbit" satellites, OSCARs 10 and 13, I picked up a used Cushcraft AOP-1 antenna set.  This gave me 20 elements on two meters and 18 elements on 70cm, circularly polarized.  To point them, I found a rebuilt AR-40 rotor and modified  my old Alliance U-110 for elevation.  This turned out to be a less than satisfactory combination.  The U-110 doesn't really have a brake, and the torque of the antennas tended to make it rotate out of position.  Back to the phone and the packet ads to find a used Yaesu G-500A elevation rotor, and one more trip up to the roof of the garden shed where the antennas sat on an old tripod mount.  I spent a lot of time up on that shed roof, fiddling with antennas.  For example, I home-brewed a plywood rotor plate for the AR-40, but didn't provide enough space for the rotor to move.  The bell housing cut a groove in the plywood, and the first

good rain caused the wood to swell up, stopping the rotor cold.  Polyurethane has its limits.
In the summer of 1995, I heard a fellow on packet talking about an Icom 271H/471H pair he was putting up for sale.  These are multimode radios that put out enough power to work the high orbit satellites without external amps.  The deal included two meter and 70cm preamps and the price was so good I almost felt guilty taking him up on it.
With the new radios, I was able to start working the high orbit birds, AO-10 and AO-13.  It was now possible to use satellites that would be in view for hours at a time, not minutes, and that covered huge areas of the earth.  I could also work through Fuji-OSCAR 20 and AO-27 which are Mode JA birds, two meters up and 70cm down.  AO-27 is an FM satellite.  The Doppler shift is wicked on these satellites, and the tuning is backwards compared to most of the other spacecraft up there.  Again, along with new equipment came the need for new skills. 
The ARRL WAS map was starting to fill up.  States that are tough for HF WAS, like New Hampshire and Delaware, actually got filled in pretty quickly.  The satellite sub-bands aren't all that big, so if there's an active station on the air from a given state it's not that hard to track him down. The things that make it hard to make satellite QSOs often have more to do with time zones and orbital mechanics.  It can be really frustrating to see that RS-10 or FO-20 will be having great passes for the US during the week, but they'll be late night passes by the weekend.  Or you've got great shots in the early morning, but people in the Western