From: davebuo
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2021 18:48:38 GMT

Last year I travelled to East Suffolk and operated Beru from the M6T station, just a few days before the lockdown. Current restrictions meant I couldn’t go there this year, and actually the 15m stack didn’t survive the recent winds – tower is ok but lower yagi is now vertically polarised. So, I was interested to see how I could do from home, buoyed by a satisfactory performance in CQWW CW from this QTH with a single tribander.

The days before the contest were spent rigging a 35ft lightweight lattice mast and putting up my trusty old Tet tribander by gin-pole method, not quite missing the ends of the branches of a beech tree – it’s a challenge getting the antenna up in these surrounds. I had the 20m delta loop and I could tune the doublet on 15m which gave me a very limited SO2R capability but not the confidence to dual CQ, I typically found stations on the second radio and then QSYed to work them with the beam. On 80 and 40 I strapped the feeders of the doublet and fed it as a tee, so the second radio had to use one of the receive antennas and again, I had to QSY the main radio when I found something to work. The K9AY is fixed at 240 degrees – there isn’t enough room for a 4-way switchable K9AY but the broadly west direction worked extremely well.

I didn’t have any of Don’s DQRM problems but I did notice some Eu ‘policeman’ trying to run people off the 14.000-14.010MHz segment which to his (unidentified) mind was ‘only for DX’. What are VK/ZL/9V/5Z to a G, I wonder? The Tesla contest was unwelcome but they largely stayed clear of the bottom 10kHz, which was much appreciated.

My major tactical error was not to pay enough attention to 40 and 80 once it got dark. I stayed on 20 as long as possible and then took a break, figuring that I’d have all night to work the low bands but signals on both dropped dramatically and I think I lost out on a lot of regular VE3 QSOs on both bands. Schoolboy error! Win-Test says I was active for 13 hours 32 minutes but it was actually nearly 21 hours, with two 45-minute breaks Saturday evening and 90 minutes’ sleep in the small hours. The numbers show under performance on 40m in particular.

The decline in VK activity really is worrying, perhaps some of them may have been more active if conditions had been better. The K index started at 4, dropped to 3 but then came back to 4 with another storm so it wasn’t a great weekend at all, as far as conditions were concerned. I can look at my logs from 20+ years ago and see how much DX was worked on 10 and 15, and at the same time tons of VKs on the 40m Sunday morning long path, almost all gone now. Great to work James 9V1YC right at the start on 15 though I had to wait my turn in the pile, and then on Sunday morning on 20m he was coming in on the long path, got him first call. This QTH is near the top of a hill sloping to the west, so that’s my best direction. Great to work six ZLs on the 80m Sunday morning long path opening, shame not to get all of them on 40 and especially 20m!

No problem getting 4 hours’ sleep after the contest, I set the alarm for 3pm so I wouldn’t miss my regular listen, Johnnie Walker’s Sounds of the Seventies on Radio2, while that was on I got the beam back down and partially de-rigged the mast before the rain set in. Reasonably happy with 258 QSOs given the limited antennas and my error on the LF bands.

K3 + HF Gemini
K3 + Ten-Tec Centurion
Win-Test 4.34.1
Homebrew SO2R controller
Dunestar bandpass filters
Tet HB33SP up 35ft
20m delta loop, corner up 32ft
66ft doublet up 32ft fed as a tee
LZ1AQ crossed loops
K9AY fixed 240 degrees

As others have noted the scores aren’t right because WT couldn’t handle the variations of ZL6HQ, good news is that the final score will be higher than shown below!

 BAND   QSO DUP DXC  HQ  POINTS BONUS   AVG
——————————————–
   80    50   1  17  13     250   780 20.60
   40    69   3  21  16     340  1060 20.29
   20   112   1  26  17     560  1300 16.61
   15    19   0  12   6      95   380 25.00
   10     3   0   1   2      15    60 25.00
——————————————–
TOTAL   253   5  77  54    1260  3580 19.13
============================================
            TOTAL SCORE : 4 840

Dave G4BUO