15:30:54
Well after a trip to Rob’s farm to help Rob and Chris erect the 80 and 30m verticals I returned home to give a solo effort from home a bash.
Plan was to use a ¼ vertical with 2 tuned raised radials and a Windom antenna to get the best of DX and inter G and EU. This did work to some extent but I had not used the Windom for quite some time and should have tested it better! The antenna caused quite a bit of RF to the PC which in turn caused problems to the radio! After crawling around on my knees under the desk in the early hours of the morning I managed to fit some RF chokes to cure this in a fashion, I could only run 250 watts but this was not a problem just something I had not counted on. I had a PSU fail on the pc which also needed replacing a day before the contest so it was not a good week for PC’s and me!!
High energy drinks for the long weekend
The Vertical was working well on DX but was causing TVI problems with the 400 watts so I also had to reduce power on the vertical to around 200 watts during the day, the vertical was in use mainly at night so this was not much of a problem although it was handy to switch between the two antennas to compare signals and reduce the noise level on times.
My conclusion of this weekends events.
Spend more time sorting my station out during the 2 weeks prior to the contest to cure these problems instead of losing my temper and my frequency. Because of these problems I lost interest and concentration and did not enjoy the event as much as I should.
END RESULT
457 Q's
332 WPX
69 DXCC
Claimed Score 402,052
73’s Ant MW0JZE – GW4OH
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