niedziela, 22 sierpnia 2010

North America NAQP SSB Party

As the NAQP SSB Contest is in nice for family life time (1800Z-0600Z) I decided to take part in this contest this year (SSB part). I must also add this contest for my calendar for next year.
The biggest problem was a place.. All my places used before were equiped with Trafic Ban sign and I cannot legally accees them any more. I asked some local hams for help but they didnt point me any specific place. Again I reviewed my area with Google Earth and decided for some region. So packed everything I could find into the car and started to search for some nice place. I visited many hills (wherever I could (and sometimes was not allowed too.) and finally after around two hours I found some interesting and accessible place. I had scanner with me tunned to some RTTY stations and was looking or place with possibly strong signal reception.





The place I found was open for most directions (especially West/North-West), was not banned from traffic (at least no traffic sign) and it was road with dead end. Would be good to find owner to have "agree" but how?
I assembled Superantenna YP3 on 10m mast (for Spiderbeam there was no time) and tried to find some american stations. At the beginning I found many european stations working in contest (but not mine as the were giving report with QSO numer when in "my" contest the report was followed by name). Later I found some stations working "my" contest but any of these american stations could hear me. Finnally I did 3 QSO, two wit european stations and one with United States (but not contest - lighthouse).




This was my first real test of working from this car. It is possible and quite comfortable but I can't imagine do this for more than a few hours. This experiment enlighted also problem with power for radio - freshly charged 17Ah battery died really soon. I must have bigger battery (possibly 50..70Ah) and in future power generator. There is of course possibility to use car batery but have to find method to avoid loosing power for car startup.