Posts from — February 2007

I’m seriously thinking of changing how I operate from the Pacific Northwest.

I’ve usually decided to go on DXpeditions as the standard home setup here (vertical, low power) and will become untenable once I move into our new home in about a month (great western takeoff angle and the rest of the world ends 100 feet in the side of a hill…).

But, Washington State has many great parks that happen to sit right on the salt water ocean. And a vertical sitting at the high water mark with radials over salt tend to perform pretty well. As in: 20-over nine somewhere in the world all of the time.

If I take a five day vacation time, I can usually operate one contest with the five days if I go on a DXpedition. Using this method of park, verticals and radials on salt water, I could theoretically operate five contests Friday-Sunday using the same vacation time.

The question is…what vertical antennas should I be using that would perform well and easily be set up and torn down for the three day adventure?

Scot, K9JY

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This weekend I submitted for a new certificate to include TI5/K9JY and received the confirmation from the ARRL this morning in e-mail.

As a result, I’ll be uploading the TI5/K9JY logs tonight after work (Pacific Time) or 27-Feb-2007 UTC.

Scot, K9JY

UPDATE: Completed. TI5/K9JY QSO’s have been uploaded to LOTW

Quick update:

I’ve ordered the QSL cards for the TI trip and the CQ WW RTTY Prefix and ARRL CW contests here in February. According to the reply back, I should be getting the cards in two weeks and I’ll start processing them then.

Scot, K9JY

What a great contest! The ARRL CW Contest offered it all of us in Costa Rica…a little Murphy lurking at the beginning of the contest, some issues with keyers and software, great runs on all of the bands and the normal sleep deprivation.

And a bonus, for this time of the sunspot cycle: a two hour ten meter opening Sunday afternoon resulting in 120 QSO’s and 28 multipliers. Hopefully, we made those 120 hams on the other end a little bit happy. We were pretty jazzed over it all.

For our two operating positions, we hit 300 QSO’s an hour a couple of times and had great good runs on all of the bands, including 160 meters.

Our preliminary score is 6,000 QSO’s and about 5.5 million points.

And a really nice time — thanks to our hosts, Keko and Sophie.

We had a good contest as TI5N here in Costa Rica. Raw score a bit of 6.0 million before submission. We’re going to submit the score from here.

QSL’ing for the contest and TI5N is through the manager.

The TI5/xxxx call signs we are using outside of the contest should be QSL’d to the home call.

Monday and today we took a side trip to the Pacific Ocean and a resort called Punta Leona. Stayed overnight, sat on the beach, had a good glass of wine and generally hung out not doing much. Exactly what I need from a vacation.

Of course, we had to try a little radio stuff. N7OU brought along a K1 and we strung up a 50-foot wire on the beach. The K1 puts out 1.5 watts and with a AA-battery amplifier puts out 3.0 watts into the antenna. From the beach, he worked one stateside station and got a 449 report. Pretty wild.

Here’s a picture of the beach at Punta Leona:

It’s a tough life of a DXpeditioner, but someone has to do it. I volunteered.Scot, K9JY