10/09/2005 | K1WHS Every contest is different. The September effort from Maine was very different! The weather was very nice, but exceedingly dry, and the lack of any water vapor anywhere near us made for January type conditions on all bands.(The power line noise even sounded like January!!) We were all very frustrated to hear stations to our South getting into some pretty good tropo. Beacons that are audible all summer, were not heard here all weekend. It was that bad! The higher bands were a struggle, and many grids that we normally get, came up short this time. There was some aurora late Saturday night that got our spirits up, and we heard the buzz on 50 thru 432. All the 432 aurora stations were already worked via other modes, but some nice grids were added to the 222 effort, (K9NS sounded like a code practice tape.) and we made up for the lack of tropo with some grids on 144 AU as well. On Sunday night, things started to come back to normal, but we still could not work anywhere near what our Southern friends were all excited about. We worked two or three stations on 144 beyond our normal range, but nothing on the higher bands.
Nothing seemed to go right. We installed a large fixed vertically stacked eight yagi array on 222 MHz, only to have it get creamed by some in band video spurious rf from the local PBS station. Naturally it peaked S-5 at the same heading as New York, Philly, and Baltimore...the golden corridor. The fixed array was not that effective as a result. (and we have a spur to chase down!)
We had an average of about 8 or 9 people here at any given time. Chef Monte, N1LBI, our illustrious cook, changed his fare this time, as the weather was actually rather chilly, so he made lots of stew and soup. The breakfast stew was rather hearty, and we gave the coffee pot a workout with all the hot drinks we needed.
It seemed that the microwave station was always clogged up with skeds. A good part of this was due to the horrible conditions evident all weekend. We were calling and calling with darn little to show for it many times. We even killed a transistor driver due to overwork! Too may dashes sent on 5 and 10 GHZ!!! We have to fix that bottleneck with the microwaves.
So what went right? Well our diesel powered AC power source worked like a champ all weekend, and the equipment failures were not too serious. We made some good WSJT meteor contacts on 144 late at night. I think all concerned got a good lesson in working under adverse conditions too. Improvements are in order on some of the higher bands. Wait 'til next year!! -- K1WHS