With a solar flux of around 68 – 70 what is to be done from Signal Point in late November? As the contest director for this event it is my task to put together a great team to milk the most from these challenging conditions and see if we can repeat last year’s win. The truth is conditions, as crappy as they’ll be, favor our location on the lower end of a north/south path into North America and all those lovely three point contacts.
Jeff, K8ND and I have been running and winning single band 160 Meter contests remotely from Signal Point the last two seasons. The Stew Perry contest is a favorite because multipliers are based on distance and Curacao is a long way from even the United States. There is no east coast advantage!
Yes – the QRO Signal point remote lives. It has been set-up, configured and de-bugged. The remote operating manual is now up-to-date, and available from the club web site or direct from me. Both CW and SSB work fine, and FT-8 is being figured out. K1ZN, W0CG, NA2U, K8ND, and KB7Q have already been operating the new high-power set-up.
This state of the art club resource was all made possible by Jeff, K8ND donating the use of an Elecraft KPA500 watt amplifier, KAT500 tuner, and cabling. That’s about $2.8K of gear folks. Thanks to Jeff, K1ZN also for the gear transport from Georgia to Curacao last March. I’ve made sure that all club members who have tried to set-up and access the remote have succeeded.
Our club has been using Microsoft Windows 7 Professional operating system for many years now on our contest logging computers. It’s pretty stable, everyone has learned the interface, and it runs fine on modest machines. There are two issues however that suggest we might have to move on to Windows 10 down the line. WIN7 Install media and proper licenses for any new computers we get are getting harder to find, even on eBay. Microsoft stopped mainstream support for WIN7 in 2015, and will terminate all support the first day of 2020. Our computer are all hooked to the Internet so a steady stream of security patches is highly desirable to keep our machines safe. That will be ending in 2020.
Nobody was more surprised then I was, when word reached me here in Montana that I’d been elected Vice President of the club. I’ll keep doing my best to help us be ready, willing, and able to be competitive in contests going forward, and have maximum fun along the way. Here’s a brief update what I’ve been doing recently to extend the benefit of your club membership.
I was able to spend several weeks at Signal Point last winter helping Geoff repair and evaluate all our amps, spare transmitting tubes, and get our 16 computers contest ready. I also performed some upgrades to our three K3 transceivers to improve SSB contesting.
In addition, I learned all about the care and feeding of the house systems, and after Geoff left for Idaho Joyce and I hosted two young hams (DK6SP, and M0SDV) for a short visit, and the WPX SSB contest group from Georgia lead by K1ZN.
While on site I was happy to serve as the control op for our remote station. Before I departed, I even managed to squeeze in a test of the Elecraft KPA500 solid state amp that K8ND has loaned the remote operation to give us some QRO watts. More on that going forward as we work the kinks out – but I can tell you operating the remote station is a hoot and a half. Let me know if you want to give it a try, I have comprehensive documentation available.
On the purely fun side of things I was able to put PJ2T on 2M moonbounce this past February and make 242 contacts. I was shocked at how well the single 12 element Yagi and 900 watt amp I brought down worked. It’s good to be the DX!
We all know that many times it’s the small things that can add up to Signal Point operating improvements, so I’ve been working that. I found three replacement porcelain base knife switches on eBay for our 80/75 meter EU wire beam that we use to changing the tuning from CW to SSB and back. The salt air has pretty much destroyed the units currently in place. I just donated a Pelican 1550 case to be used as on site K3 transceiver storage. I also finally got around to making up the 80 meter stub to complement the 40 and 20 meter units I made previously.
In closing I would like to thank all of you who have generously donated to the European tower replacement project. This is a major, and necessary undertaking for the club this year. I can’t stress enough your support is critical right now as we muster the myriad of items and get them on a ship headed to Curacao. Don’t hang back, everyone of us needs to step up where we can. Thank you.
Gene Shea, KB7Q