02/06/2006 | KG4LEV Each year, hams all over get excited about participating in the VHF Contest in January. Thanks to the ARRL for sponsoring such a great event along with many others throughout the year. This year the Western Piedmont Amateur Radio Club (located in Morganton, NC) and the Marion Amateur Radio Associations (located in Marion, NC) Club Presidents (KI4GZD and KG4LEV) went atop Walker Top Mountain for a joint effort in the January VHF contest. We operated under John's call this year (KG4LEV) because we used mine last year and it's more difficult than you think to use someone else's call sign. As you can imagine I goofed a few times. I tried to take a few pictures from the weekend but we were having too much fun and I didn't get as many as last year.

We set-up a camper and made a weekend out of contesting. Walker Top is approximately 3000 ft' give or take a few feet. We used fairly large beam antennas for SSB 432, 222 and 2 meter and a 3 element 6 meter setup on Rohn Tower than mounted in a mount made by John (KG4LEV) that mounted in the hitch on his truck. We used a Tri-bander Vertical (444, 223, 144) attached to the top of a 100' Fire tower and a 6 meter halo loop Omni directional antenna mounted in the hitch of my (KI4GZD) truck.

With preliminary results, it looks like we scored over 14,000 points from Saturday at 2p.m. till Sunday about 4p.m. With darkness approaching and work the next day we figured we needed to get started on our 5 hour tear down. This year was so much better than last year, the weather was gorgeous and perfect for contesting except when we started tearing the assembly down, the wind started blowing really bad and the it was right at freezing and everything was iced over which made for a fun time tearing everything down. Climbing the 100' Fire tower, which had steps iced over and the wind blowing upwards of 40 plus mph made for an interesting venture to remove the antenna but we managed to get it down.

We had a blast this year as always and can't wait till June to do it again.

Greg -- KI4GZD