9am Saturday morning, just a quick walk down to the antennas to see if all looks OK. That’s odd I could have sworn I parked the Yagi on NE for VK/ZL but its pointing SE, strange. Quick look at the indicator in the shack and yes it says NE! So what’s going on? I found I could turn the beam but the direction was somewhat random in fact when the contest finished the beam was 180 deg out. This made for a challenging contest, lots of rushing back and forth to check the actual yagi direction for the entire contest as the error kept changing.
Nonetheless I thought conditions were quite reasonable and managed to break a few pile ups when the required direction and the beams actual direction were roughly the same. And there were certainly plenty of VK/ZL stations to work but probably fewer VEs than normal.
10m Usual spotty conditions 5X,5Z,9J, ZS around 1030-1300 and then ZF in the afternoon. No VE heard.
15m Outstanding signals from ZL6HQ on 15m SP . Jackie sounded as loud as a local as did VK6T and a nice bonus was ZD7.
20m Plenty of activity but for me no VE7, mystifying.
40m My receiving is limited by noise especially to the NW. and the noise nulling set up is much less effective on 40 than I had hoped. I might change to a rotary dipole this summer as the verticals are picking up too much local noise
80m So transmit on 80m and bang the SWR hits 4:1 the amp says ‘no way jose’ and shuts down. Flash over in ATU. It goes without saying that this did not occur in testing. On 80m though I have at last made some progress on noise reduction. Better engineering for next year. I think I will try shunt feeding the tower next.
On 80 too I should have stayed up later on Saturday but staying awake when the bands go quiet is practically impossible for me these days.
DXLog worked fine and the new version of the software has cured the slow band change problem I experienced in February. I like the SO2V implementation especially.
Looking back at the whole contest I was a bit dispirited with the rotator problem which looks like a complete antenna dismantling to get the rotator out for a new potentiometer(?) to be fitted. Its certainly true that a contest quickly finds the weaknesses in your set up.
See you next year.
BAND QSO BONUS HQ DUP POINTS AVG
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80 18 10 5 0 90 5.0
40 43 33 5 0 215 5.0
20 75 46 8 0 370 4.9
15 41 34 4 0 205 5.0
10 6 5 1 0 30 5.0
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TOTAL 183 128 23 0 910 5.0
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FINAL SCORE: 3 930