Sweeps, CQWW, 160, and 10-Meter Contests...Fall/winter 2003:
I ended up being a contest maniac this fall and winter. I started out by helping W0AIH out at the farm for the phone portion of the CQWW contest. I ended up out in the 20 meter shack for about a good 18 hours or so. Darrell (KB9LVK) came out and ran the 20-meter spot station while I was running 20. We all got done and at the time we all unofficially score somewhere in the vacinity of 5.3 million points. Great bunch of guys and great equipment to use.
November came around, and I ended up running only a half an hour at for the Nov. CW Sweeps. I got a whole whopping 50 points. The Nov. phone SS and the CQWW CW contests I also ran out of the house. I did a test run of my homebrew 160 meter vertical during one of these contests, and it seemed to work ok. Come December, I ran the 160 vertical and thought I actually did fairly well. The antenna is basically a 3.5" diameter cardboard tube about 2 feet long, with about 135-145 turns of I think #16 teflon coated wire. I lost count of the turns while winding it. This coil is fed to a mirror mount bracket which has a 1/4 wave 10 meter whip threaded to it. The whole assembly is attached to the tower mast pipe (25 feet), and fed directly with the center conductor of the coax feedline. the braid of the coax feed is attached to a ground rod, and my attempt at a 160 meter wire dipole for counterpoise. This is looped razor wire like across my little 20 foot wide by 80 foot long yard. I essentially run a tuner exclusively on it, but it works well.
10 meters was not very good this year for the contest. I suspect with all the solar activity this fall, it was inevitable that 10 would be bad. I did not reach last years score, and the band was very quiet compared to last year. I thought it was me, but apparently everyone was experiencing the same thing. I also noticed during this fall's contest season, that there was some strange propagation paths. I was working stations in the West by pointing SouthEast, and working Northern stations by pointing East. This seemed mostly prevalent on 10 meters. I seemed to work stations off the side of the beam better than pointing long or short path. Others also seemed to notice this.
This was a very enjoyable yet hectic fall season. I learned a lot, and had fun. Some pictures to follow.
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