We participate in CQ 160 meters again this year with OH4AB team in multi-op category from OH4MFA/OH4KZM station. We are sure happy we did. Great conditions, even here above 62nd latitude. Lot of NA for us, Asia was a bit disappointment, mostly EU in our log naturally. Normally we have only few NA contacts, this year we get 26 multipliers! We didn't listen radio during daylight hours, so we can't tell, if we could have heard DX in broad daylight. We did some antenna work for couple of weekends before contest. Repaired and re-arranged Beverage antennas, fixed half wave dipole and tuned parasitic vertical array elements. We used K2/100 on running station with amplifier and FT-920 on spotting station. N1MM was used on both and they were networked with WLAN. Receive antenna was split to both rigs and a relay was installed to protect Yaesu's front-end. Main station had control of antenna directions. This setup was quite effective while searching and pouncing. Other radio was spotting stations in N1MM bandmap and TX operator could just jump from spot to spot. No, we didn't have any DX cluster connected to our PC's. Occasionally we checked text-TV version of DX Summit, but it was not very useful. When running, it was quite slow to find new stations on the RX radio, but it still helped to get some multipliers and new stations in log when running station jump to get another QSO with other VFO. Funniest moment for us happened during saturday morning sunrise, while operator decided to check how stations come in with our 10 meters high dipole antenna. Click of antenna switch and silence...damn, we were using cloud warmer for several hours. It was accidentally left on-line when operator was changed around 3 Z. No wonder it seemed to be hard to get DX in log. But we worked also VP9 with this dipole! When switched back to parasitic vertical array it was like one call and DX in log. And it was already daylight. This incident gave us lot of laughs and happy moments later on during contest. Ofcourse we could have made much more contacts with better antenna. But we will remember this for long time and will check what antenna we are using. We did improve our club's record from last year by over 30%. So it could be long time until we break it again, maybe never. But we will try anyway. Thank you for contacts and we hope to see you later on the Topband!
73 GL
OH4AB contest team
Operators: OH4KBC, OH4KLU, OH4KZM and OH4MFA
Rigs: Elecraft K2/100, Yaesu FT-920
Amp: Commander HF-2500
Software: N1MM Logger, Home planet for showing grayline
TX-antennas: Parasitic vertical array, dipole 10 m high
RX-antennas: 2 x two-wire beverages 180 m long, 1 Beverage 250 m long
Other: coffee + other beverages, sauna, snacks etc
Station info: www.sral.fi/oh4mfa/topband.htm
Station almost ready in friday evening.
Friday 21 UTC, OH4KLU and XU7KBC getting ready.
OH4MFA resting.
Second op's OH4KZM QRM, Jussi 4 yrs and Juuso 6 yrs.
OH4MFA on running station and XU7KBC on spotting station.
XU7KBC tired in sunday evening around 17 UTC.
VIDEO in YouTube
Updated: 24-tammi-12
© 2000-2012 Jukka Tarvainen