Many thanks, John, for hosting the meeting on Saturday AND for you and W1NAN providing such a feast for lunch. It was a grand event!
It was also a very good meeting with thanks to Ed, W1PN, walking everybody in attendance through a “How To” for the new club website (not yet fully ready for prime time, but it’s getting there.) Hmmmm… I think I’d better put this post on that web site as well as here on the reflector.
73,
Ken K3IU
Early on the morning of Saturday, October the 16th, a crowd of club members met at the home of Jim Bowman, KS1J, to help him finalize the project that he has been working on for months. Jim had a new four element SteppIR (40m thru 6 m) that wanted to get up on the tower. The temperature was in the high 40s and the wind was whipping out of the northwest.
Jim has already assembled the SteppIR which included the 40 meter element and it seemed like it took up most of the back yard. However, in all cases like this, there was still several things needing to be done, not the least of which was figuring out how to get the 108 pound, 4 element beam, with a 32 foot boom and 34 foot long elements up to the top of the tower.
It was determined that the best way to get the 108 pound beam up to the mast was to rig a tram wire from a tree across the yard to the mast. Here are a couple of pictures showing the preparations.
And here is the other end of the tram wire…
Jim, KS1J, making the final inspections before hauling the beam up the tram wire.
I had to leave before I remembered to take a picture of the beam atop the tower, so I came back a few days later after Jim had cranked the tower up to its fifty-two feet (or so) height. Jim has reported that when he first attempted to put some RF into the beastie, he got HUGE SWR indications. However, when he plugged the coax from the beam directly into the back of the tranceiver, it was normal (or should I say, nominal). Later searching resulted in a trashed elbow connector on his manual coax switch. Jim reports that everything is working now as it should.
Here’s the SteppIR up in the air in Barrington, RI.
That’s All, Folks…
73,
Ken Wagner K3IU
Good morning, all:
The 2010 ARRL New England Convention will be held at the Holiday Inn in Boxborough, MA, on August 27-28-29, 2010. As in the past, the CTRI Contest Group will have spaces in the flea market area. Two years ago, the club realized a fairly substantial contribution to offset our operating expenses from the sales at the flea market site from the 10% or more contribution from sales.
This year, our main presence will be at the Flea Market site. Please see the minutes of the meeting on 7/24/2010 for more details. The Flea Market will be open on Saturday and Sunday.
If you have anything that you want to sell at the flea market from the club’s site, please let me know and please make a list which includes:
*What you are selling. Please assign a number to each item
*Your initial asking price
*What you would sell for initially (don’t forget that people negotiate at these events)
*What you would sell for 2 hours before closing or an absolute minimum price
*If you are selling a transceiver, state condition, configuration(filters, ATU, etc)
*Do you have a manual, if appropriate
*If you have a cell phone, please put number on list so you can be contacted.
*Anything else you think important
Please put a sticky label on each item with your call sign on it and a number that relates to the list above, and the initial asking price.
If you have things you would like to sell, but cannot attend the convention, please put a notice on the reflector and see if someone can arrange to take it up to Boxborough for you. If arrangements can be made, please include a copy of the listing mentioned above with your stuff and also send a copy to me.
I will attempt to prepare a composite listing of the items in the listing that you send to me. This will be used by those manning the flea market site.
Please send the information to me either via the reflector or directly to k3iu @ arrl.net.
73,
Ken Wagner K3IU
Portsmouth, RI
NP3U winning the 2009 World Multi-Two Plaque was made official in the July issue of CQ magazine with a 9.9 million score.
Arriving in Puerto Rico on the Wednesday before the contest, our mainland group Jay AJ1M, Ken K3IU, Bill N1HRA and John W1AN were all charged and ready for another exciting operation. From experience we knew we had some work cut out for us. Many from the mainland are probably not aware of the difficulties of maintaining equipment, especially antennas, in the tropics. In the Caribbean, each year antennas must be lowered or taken down for hurricane season and serviced before reinstalling. Humidity and salt does its damage to hardware. Coax braid turns black in short time. Even rigs suffer. Salt air corrosion is everywhere, even high in the hills at 1800 feet where we operate. For a M2 operation, our preparation took a little less time than for a MM, but still antennas needed to be raised, coax made up and everything put in order. We had two new wire antennas to raise.
The 3el 40M Monobander had high intermittant SWR. Burned up connectors were found and coax needed replacing. The rotor clamping plate had disintegrated and needed replacing. Four trips up the tower got most in order. The 6el 15m monobander was still in decent shape from our 2007 and 2008 operations but still needed to be raised. As expected most of the Hygain rotors from corrosion had non-functional azimuth indicators. With all the equipment, antennas and towers, Carlos does a great job getting ready, but counts on our group to make things sing. Since we were going to operate M2, we left down the 4el 20M Monobander, expecting good performance from the Skyhawk, which except for the rotor was in working order. The 6EL 10M Monobander was checked out and functional in the event we would find an opening. We also raised a new Carolina Windom and new Bazooka dipole for 80M.
Brought with us were the RTTY Meister PC’s with which we had great success on our last RTTY operations. They transport easily and have three real serial ports and nice audio sensitivity for running MMTTY and Writelog. Custom isolated audio/FSK and CAT cables for the 3 rigs we planned to run were made. All hooked up well. We had some difficulty customizing a CAT cable for rig control with PW1 amp control on the Icom 756 ProIII, but that was put in order. An FT1000MP with an AL1200 amp was our Station 2. The TS2000 was a backup.
We had a good start, but after a few hours time we lost the receiver on the MP, and later the receiver in the backup TS2000. Both these rigs were performing well and there was no warning. Apparently, RF getting in from the 756 Pro III was too much. The isolating filter on Station 2 was just not up to the task. Because we ran out of working radios there were about 15 hours of downtime on Station 2 until daytime when we were able to get a not quite perfect and power limited FT1000 brought in from a few hours away. We moved Station 2 to antennas further separated from Station 1 and were back on track. We lost a lot of 6 pointers from the downtime the first night and needed no more problems. The AL1200 also needed some surgery which we did during the downtime from Station 2.
The operation was very enjoyable and a lot of work! We had the additional challenge to try and beat our last years M2 NA record of over 14,000,000. It was not to happen, but we did achieve a respectable score. And considering the downtime, all the operators need to be commended for the recovery! Thanks to all who worked us and spotted us! And much appreciation for our host Carlos Colon WP4U and also Carlos Osorio WP4N. They put in many hours in the chairs.
Here are the claimed scores…
Band QSO’s Points Mults
80m: 337 1614 93
40m: 1068 5282 365
20m: 1419 3512 281
15m: 800 1926 111
10m: 2 6 0
Totals: 3626 12340 850
Claimed Score: 10,489,000
Bill Bliss, W1WBB, wanting to improve the contest scores he contributes to the club, is upgrading his wire antennas and has an 88 foot center-fed doublet that needed halyards high up in the trees, so he asked for help. Once again, John, W1XX, (aka RI’s Robin Hood) packed up his trusty bow and arrows and drove across the state to help out a club member. John prefers early mornings for his work to minimize the impact of any breezes that may come up during the day. So at 8:00 on Sunday morning, the 16th of May, John, W1XX, and Ken, K3IU, met Bill at his QTH in Portsmouth to hang another antenna. Bill has many old, tall trees in his yard and he had picked out the two trees he wanted to use for this antenna. He had not, however, expected to have the halyards completely over the top of the trees, and, never having worked with John before, didn’t know that John didn’t shoot arrows half way up a tree. John is an over-the-top kind of guy.
After extensive technical discussion and debate over a cup of coffee, it was time to proceed. Since Bill had not anticipated that we would shoot the halyard over the tree tops, he hadn’t bought as much of the black halyard as would be needed to get both ends of the antenna up in the air. So, one end is complete and the other end has the messenger line in place, but awaits the arrival of the additional black halyard.
When Bill gets this new antenna up in the air, it will be really up in the air with one end at about 50-55 feet and the other end at about 75-80 feet. He will be able to use this antenna with good results on all bands from 80 through 10 meters. For 160, he still will be using his inverted “L”; that is, unless John and Ken get back over there and help him get a better wire arrangement up for 160.
With this new antenna configuration, Bill, we expect at least a 26.2% increase in your contest scores.
