W4KAZ

Operated 2012 Field Day with N4YDU and N4GU.  Seriously considered entirely ditching FD earlier in the year, but finally decided to swing back into the saddle.  Using the Central Carolina Contesters call K4FQU, how could I not?

K4FQU – Class 1A, Ops: N4GU, N4YDU & W4KAZ….  1499 QSO’s(942CW, 557SSB)

N4YDU bird-dogged an excellent site by getting permission for operating on the north end of the Franklinton High school campus.  The school has a horseshoe shaped service road around its perimeter.  The north side of campus has a nice line of pine trees parallel to the service road which runs due E/W for about 500 feet.  All in a mostly rural very RF quiet location.  A very good Field Day site, one of the better sites we have used.

We set up the station near a break in the tree line.  Operating as 1A, we put up two antennas.  The 80m dipole was set up as a vee, broadside to N/S.  The other antenna was the four band open sleeve dipole, set up facing E/W.  The apex of both antennas was up at about 70 to 80 feet.

The wx threatened rain on Saturday, but that never happened.  The cloud cover helped moderate temperatures right up until almost 1800z, so the set up was not terribly uncomfortable.  The humidity levels rose all through Saturday night.  A change in the WX about dawn Sunday, and a drier breeze picked up early Sunday morning.  The WX was very pleasant for the duration.  Probably one of the most comfortable FD weekends in a long time outside of the trips to the mountains.

Radio conditions did not seem all that good, but the rates were consistently good anyway.  At times the rates were surprisingly good.  N4YDU had unusually good rates in the “wee hours” on Sunday morning from 2:00am thru 6:00am(local), and turned the graveyard shift into a nice fat 350+ qso count.

For my own part, the best rates I saw were the first hour of my late evening shift from 11:00pm to 2:00am(local), where there was very fun rates on 80m CW as ‘fresh meat’.  Getting a SSB run going proved difficult, but I managed to find a decent 40m frequency close to 2:00am Sunday morning, and N4YDU hit the ground running for the graveyard leg.  The rates kept him awake.  😉

N4GU Power and Light supplied emergency power in the form of a 1000w Honda generator.  We located the generator on an asphalt drive about 125 feet away from the station, and could not hear the generator at all over the ambient background noise of the location(School AC units, birds tweeting, road noise, etc.)  N4GU also supplied shelter in the form of a couple of EZ-Up canopies.  My own concerns about blood-sucking insects or T-storms were not realized, so the lack of side-walls was never a problem.

Over all the event went off without a hitch.  Murphy was probably off elsewhere knocking over towers and breaking yagi’s at other more tempting FD sites.  All of the overnight lighting was supplied by battery operated LED lamps, over concerns we might overload the generator.  Generator overload was never an issue, as a Kill-a-Watt in the AC supply line showed that the power draw never got over 500w.  With the single run station going, the draw was around 300-350watts.   The generator ran for about 7 hours between fill-ups, and was very easy on the gas.  A sweet package.

Propagation seemed to favor the North-South paths for most of the times I was at the controls.  With the 40m-up antenna at 75 feet, it seemed to under perform my expectations on 40m and 20m.  That may have been just propagation, which seemed very short on 20m.  In the evening, it did a better job out to the west, but I found myself using the 80m dipole on the 40m band more than I expected.  Both antennas were fed with 450 ohm ladder line into balanced tuners, allowing them to be loaded where needed.

Reviewing the Reverse Beacon Network spots was interesting.

We wound up besting our QSO totals from 2011 by a couple of hundred Q’s.  10m never opened, 6m was a flop, and 15m was mediocre.  But 80m, 40m, and 20m produced enough activity that we were able to keep the logging computer busy and the operators awake.  Operating 1A with N4GU and N4YDU was just about perfect – both great ops and great fun.  Class 1A also insured we were almost always ‘fresh meat’ somewhere, which made the butt-in-chair time fun as well.

The only real goal I had this year was to have some fun.   Mission Accomplished.

After action reflections indicated if we were to revisit the location we might make a few minor tweaks to the general set-up by re-locating the antennas, but probably nothing too drastic.  The E/W roadway invites flat-topping the dipoles rather than center supporting them as inv-vee’s.   A few other minor station set-up re-arrangements.  None of those would be of large consequence in terms of extra effort, but might pay QSO and comfort dividends.

K4FQU, 1A NC - Quick snapshot of score:

band/mode  Qs       Pts
80 cw     222      444
80 ph     181      181
40 cw     440      880
40 ph     164      164
20 cw     231      462
20 ph     141      141
21 cw      45       90
21 ph      63       63
50 cw       4        8
50 ph       8        8
-----------------------------
         1499     2441

Pwr mult 2

Raw score 4882

Bonus pts
100% Emergency power             100
Public Location                   100
W1AW Message                      100
Online submisson                 50
Total bonus pts                   350

Total Score     4882 + 350 = 5232 pts

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Did not expect to be able to put the time in for this one, but enough things shifted around at the end of the week that it worked out.  Murphy showed his face in the form of a broken headphone jack on the homebrew SO2R headphone audio jack, which I broke at 1805z as I plugged the headphone cable in.   Not off to a smooth start.  The jack is actually intack, it just became separated from the cover of the home-brew SO2R box.

Better to log Q’s than pull the box from the patch cord rats’ nest, so that fix has to wait. So no S&P2R. 🙁

Conditions here seemed good. 10m and 15m had decent signals, even if I couldn’t get a run going. After about 3:00pm local, 20m started to go short without losing the long, and seemed to be open to everywhere in North America at once. Worked TX, CA, NY, SK and SC almost back to back right before I took a dinner break at 4:45pm local.

No runs on 10m or 15m. 20m run was decent, and the unusual mixed bag of stations from everywhere kept me there when I should have migrated to 40m. Should have started the contest on 20m and migrated to 40m much earlier. 40m was long by the time I got there, so I moved down to 80m after short 40m pass. 80m was pretty good, nice and quiet here in the KazShack, and lots of solid signals. Nice 80m run. 160m was also nice and quiet, with good signals. The K9AY was hearing better down on 160 than the xmit antenna, even with low QRN. Too bad 160m condx were not as good as that for Stew Perry.

The 80m S&P was a blast.  Keeping a 50/hr rate was easy.  Not having the SO2R was a bit of a downer.  With the good conditions on all bands, S&P2R would have really been a lot of fun.  The 40m totals would have been bolstered with the second radio. I think I’d have been able to hit that goal of a 60Q hour of all SS&P if the SO2R box had been on-line.

Didn’t really set any goals other than to have some fun.  DONE!

But still only half as many Q’s as the Top Gunz……and it is certain THAT ain’t because of Murphy.

The Good:

• Good conditions on all bands – compared to recent years.
• Lots of Fun
• 5:00pm Hamburger break…yummy
• 416 Q’s and only one TEBOW
• Good to see some interest in fielding PVRC teams

The Bad:

• SO2R not available.  Fun value not gathered in as well as it might have been otherwise.
• CW copy needs work.
• Too lazy to do the work to improve the CW
• muffed the off times, so erred on the side of staying inside the rules.  9 hours rather than 10

The Ugly:

Oh, probably the language used when I broke that #@%%*&!! headphone jack.  The jack separated from the panel.  The repair might be a case of filling the hole with JB Weld and re-drilling it.  It looks like the plastic panel face is reamed out.

The final “Final”:

Call: W4KAZ
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:   61    23
   80:  154    43
   40:   61    31
   20:  106    41
   15:   26     9
   10:    8     8
-------------------
Total:  416   155  Total Score = 64,480

3830 score link

73 es tnx fer q’s and fills de w4kaz

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