Lockyer Valley Amateur Radio Club

ARRL 10 Meter Oceania DX 2011

This year the Lockyer Valley Radio & Electronics Club entered the ARRL 10 Meter Contest to break their previous VK Multi-Single record set in 1999 when they used VK4DZ as the call.

Ken VK4QH and Alan VK4SN decided to run two antennas as Ken had just erected a 6 element mono-bander with a 10 meter boom, and the beam width was very narrow. Two 75 ohm phasing coaxes were put together and joined to a T piece at the linear and fed to the antenna distribution box on the shack wall. On the Friday prior to the contest Alan set up his portable mast and tri-band beam for use as the 2nd antenna, and both antennas were joined to the rear of the patch panel.

There were good conditions during the day, but a very nasty hail and lightning storm stopped operations for about 3 hours on the Saturday afternoon, and the band died around 9pm local on both days. Best runs were first up in the morning into the states including a surprise long path contact to a EA8 station who thought it was Christmas. Another happy customer was K6BBQ who worked us on 5 watts from a wire hanging out of a tree in a park in California. His video can be seen at http://youtu.be/Imv8AmkJBjs where we feature towards the end of the video.

Come Sunday morning it was looking like our record may not be achieved, so we put the last two hours into CW contacts making many new mults along the way and leaving our previous record in the dust. We achieved our goal, and made 1st in Australia and 1st in Oceania for the DX Multi-Single High-Power category, setting another VK MS HP record.

Totals of 1,914 contacts (840 CW, 1074 USB. 0.78:1 Ratio), 1,321,672 confirmed points, beating our 1.2 Million set in 1999.

SSB operators for the contest were Ken VK4QH, Peter VK4MN, Wayne VK4HS, and Alan VK4SN was the CW op.