DG7LAN did work his first contest from beginning to the end. That was something. Ok, I have to admit that I slept in between. But just for 1 hour ;) I worked from the rear seat of my Jeep as I often do. The setup was the following:
- ICOM 7300
- Notebook with N1MM (love it)
- manual VCI ATU (mainly to switch between the antennas)
- Kelemen dipol for 80m/40m/20m 35m over ground
- 40m inverted L with automatic tuner (worked well for 80/40 locals)
- Hanuta and CocaCola
There was a total of 881Qs and a claimed score of 216258. But I am sure there are a few 0 scores in the log since I did CW for the first time in contest and most likely messed up some of the exchanges ;) I don't care, room to improve.
My antennas were supported by some really huge trees. Thanks to mother nature! On the pictures you see the dipole with the support point for the inverted L.
Unfortunately I had to work LOW POWER since I didn't manage to get my 'new' Ameritron AL811H running in time.
Conclusions:
- N1MM rocks!
- The IC7300 does well in crouded environment and on busy band
- If you put out a strong signal and have a nice run, there is always the one guy that tries to interfere. Thank god, most guys just push a carrier or CW for a few minutes and then move on. Thats easily eliminated by the notch in the 'IF' path.
- It's ok to sleep an hour at night. The bands got really quiet and there were only stations I worked before. That was close past midnight.
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| Bad picture of the dipol |
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| Bad picture of the dipol - hard to see |
As one can see, I did some CW in the last 3 hours and had a great run. Many OPs were really patient and some even slew down a little. I love it.
Upcoming weekend: CQ WW SSB! CU!
