Monthly Archives: October 2012

Harvester making room for the 60m tower

Except working the CQWW DX SSB contest I marked out the spot where the new 60m tower will be placed. The plan was to make quite wide room for the guy wires so that no trees would be able to fall over them. But when we started marking out the paths supposed to be cut we realized that not much would be left, so instead we just took all of it around the footprint of the 60m tower. That also makes us get a big room where we can lift towers from. If we would have done this by hand I think we would have been working for a LONG time, now this machine does it 2-3 days and I might even have some money leftover after the trees have been sold to the forest company. It hurts a bit though to do this, but i think it will look nice when the tower is in place and all branches has been removed.

I got to ride with him in the harvester too which was really cool, what a piece of machinery! Just amazing how efficient it is even though this is a quite small one it does a great job! I think I spent a couple of hours with him in that machine.

SM2NOG also came over with the 40m military tower with help from his brother. So now that tower is also in place. I saw some welding need to be done on a minor broken part of it but otherwise it looks great and ready to be put up. So now we just need to wait for the spring so we can continue this project.

And Zoli, I’m sorry but the trees had to go 🙁

CQWW DX SSB 2012

This year as usual we attended in the M/S class. Our hopes to beat last years result were not really high even though propagation’s were awesome the week before the contest. However the SFI dropped by the start of the contest but we did not suffer from any aurora which was a real upside. I had set a goal that if we made over 6000 qsos I would be happy and we did do that with quite a margin. The start of the contest was the most amazing I have ever experienced. We worked 491q first 2 hours, 705q in the first three hours were most were 3 pt QSOs on 20m. After 12 hours we had 2396 contacts and at the 24h mark we were at just under 4000 QSOs. The second day was not as good but we could end the contest with several 100+ hours of 3 pt QSOs towards NA on 20m which is always a relief not needing to work EU on the lowbands.

                    CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB

Call: SJ2W
Operator(s): SE2T SM2LIY SM2WMV SM3JLA
Station: SJ2W

Class: M/S HP
QTH: Da Traesk
Operating Time (hrs): 48

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries
------------------------------
  160:  187    10       55
   80:  201    23       90
   40: 1129    34      125
   20: 2124    36      138
   15: 1644    34      133
   10: 1358    40      145
------------------------------
Total: 6643   177      686  Total Score = 11,726,444

Club: Worldwide Young Contesters

Comments:

Not as good propagation's as last year so we could not reach last years result.
We can not complain though since we pretty much had no aurora at all during the
whole weekend. The only sad part was that the SFI dropped just before the
contest which made us lose some of the night propagations on 15/10m but 20m was
absolutely amazing during the first night. We did more running on 10/15 this
year which also explains the drop in our 20m numbers compared to last year. It
was nice to end the contest with several good hours of US runs on 20m as a
result. Hats of to the other EU teams that keep competing in the this category
which must be the toughest one in this contest.

We had fun but we are lacking operators as usual, it seems like contesting in
SM2 is not very popular, which is a bit sad.

Everything worked great and we used N1MM instead of Win-Test,and it worked
great  during the whole contest and will be used in the CW part as well. We had
three stations running but still no inband option, hopefully its completed for
the CW-part. We lack good flexibility on 20m which I hope to improve for the CW
part with a 5el mono that is rotatable for 20m.

FT1000MKV + 4-1000A
FT2000 + ACOM 2000A (from Ojojoj Music AB)
IC-7400 + 4CX1500B

Link to 3830 post

Autumn work

I’ve been a bit sloppy with the updates lately, sorry for that but I will try to update more frequently now again. What has happened lately is that I have given up the hope of getting the military tower up this year, right now outside its snowing and the ground is so wet from all rain that it will not be possible to either make the foundation or get a crane in there. The house work this summer just took too long time, so hopefully next year in the spring we will continue the work of this tower and also make everything ready to put up the 60m tower next winter.

So SM2XJP came up with the good idea to finish the WARC tower installation this autumn instead, thus making it one less thing to do next year. So me and SM2XJP spent the weekend building a 7el yagi for 6m that I designed with 8m boom. The boom comes from an old TH6 that I made a bit longer. The antenna will be placed about 19.5-20m above ground in the WARC tower and we will move the WARC duobander as well from the 60m tower. Left to do on the 6m beam is installing a vertical boom support and add a coaxial cable with balun to it. Hopefully the SWR looks as it should. The WARC duobander need to be adjusted a bit to get the resonance at the right frequency but that is an easy task. I will also need to build antenna switches, one 1×6 switch that will be located up in the WARC tower and a 2×6 switch to be located in the house so that we can route the main radio in the shack or remote radio to either the regular antenna switch system or to the WARC tower. This to make avoid running such long cables out to the switch room.

In two weeks I will meet with a forest company doing some work on my neighbors land and since they are so close they will do the work making room on my land for the new 60m tower. That will save us A LOT of time and hopefully bring in some money for the project as well.

I’ve also been trying the remote out and it works so great. Thanks to Ojojoj Music AB, Remoterig and SG3P for making it possible. It is really, really fun to be able to control the station and work QSOs during the week days when I am up at the work QTH. Now only the tower rotation is left to do which will be a high priority during the autumn and winter.

SA2BZE also came by and worked some QSOs in SAC SSB with his own call (SJ2T), but propagation’s were really, really horrible. I heard that SK2T who are not far away from us had a few hours in the night which delivered 1q/h. Fun to work radio from SM2 😉

I’ve also cleaned the yard up for the winter, which seem to have been just in time since it started to snow today. I doubt this snow will stay since its so early but if it does and you have stuff outside, its very easy to damage it during the winter when the tractor shovels the snow etc.