SAC CW 2015

23 Sep 2015 by sm0w, No Comments »

So was this years SAC CW Contest over! I had serious competing plans running SO2R and be at the top of the game this year, unfortunately our best of friends Mr Murphy decided to pay a visit! The days before the contest I prepared stuff at the station. Big thanks also to SM0KDG Dag who helped out changing a faulty coax to an antenna on friday evening before the contest! I was in the forrest myself on friday evening putting the beverage antenna switch matrix boxes in place after thunder season. It took quite alot of time (as it usually does) but the result was ever so good! We also found the 330 degree beverage (to W6/KL7 from here) was broken. This has to be fixed soon!

During the week prior to the contest I digitalized the home brew rotator för the 8 element 10m quad getting it controllable via our station automatyion system openASC. The indicator for the antenna is done by a syngon element, so I figured the KISS method (Keep It Simple Stupid) of digitalizing this would be just to glue a potentiometer to the axis of the syngon element, so I did, and mounted the rotator card for the openASC bus inside the rotator box.

Everything was ready for the contest except setting up the logging software that I planned doing on the morning before the contest. So about 3 hours before "liftoff" I came to the station and started messing around with Win-Test and the MK2R+ SO2R box. But I was not able to get Dual CQ working in any way.. Either Radio A or Radio B was transmitting but not both. So last minute call was to work only one radio to have everything working. I managed to get on air just when the contest started.

After a few hours I had to go outside for a "technical brake", and noticed that two of the antennas was pointing in strange directions! WTF! So it took me little over one hour to correct this and I lost at least 100-150 QSOs.. And afterwards really pissed of, and at 2 AM we had K index 7 and aurora and I could not motivate myself to stay awake so I decided to rest for a while, woke up at 6 AM and started working again. So the final  result was 1600 QSOs and 121 mults. Could have been 1800 QSOs and lots more mults if I've had both rigs.

I will make a new attempt in the SSB part in October. ( Pray to the propagation gods and will try to fence Mr Murphy off)

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OJØR Market Reef

OJØR Market Reef

OJØR is my callsign during visits to the barren rock of Market Reef in the middle of the Baltic sea. [&hellip