Today I continued my work on the fabrication of the antenna hardware. I drilled the hole pattern in the 40m element plates and also welded the element guy support. I would not really need vertical guylines on the 40m elements because they are made from 60mm tubing in the middle, but it’s pretty much for free to add it and then it should hold up for more snow or ice loading if disaster strikes.
Me and a friend went away and bought a bunch of iron at a store about 30km away from where I work. They are not that extremely expensive which is nice and they are used to sell to regular people and not just companies as many others who are a mess trying to buy from.
I decided to build 2 boom struts for the 20m yagis and some element/boom plates for the 40m yagis. I also did some other minor stuff like some supports for my RAGE 2 chop saw. That thing is just a beast! It still cuts iron like it was butter and I have not changed blade yet, it’s awesome and makes building these kind of things so much faster and more fun.
The CQ WPX CW contest was a disaster propagation’s wise. The inband system worked fine except that we had IMD issues with the preamp on the vertical. Marius, LB3HC thought we should put an attenuator before it which reduced the IMD issues but made the weak signals harder to copy. The solution for this will be that now when we move the vertical to a new QTH we will put out hardline so we don’t need the preamp, or at least not as high gain preamp. We got 220m of 1 1/4″ from SM2RIX earlier and I will put together the cables I got from SM2OAN to a length of ~450m which should reach the new location. The concept works great and hopefully it can be extended even more in the future.
Otherwise some stuff got done during the week, not as much as I had hoped for though but it took some time preparing for the contest. The base bearing for the military tower got mounted by me, SM2XLL and SM2XJP. I got 8 tonnes of gravel delivered and pretty much finished up another side of the house so now it’s only one side left to be done. The concrete in the basement seem to be hardening well so it will be a lot nicer to do stuff inside that room in the future and hoepfully the basement will stay cleaner as well.
SM2UVU is making the bottom plate which connects the K-600 section to the base bearing this week, so hopefully with this dry weather the ground will dry out fast so I can make the concrete base for the tower.
My dad, SM3LIC and SM3UZS did visit during the week as well. It was A LOT of fun and they also brought me some stuff that will be useful in my various projects. My dad also brought a BBQ which I had asked him buy since the old one broke, this one is a bit bigger and more well made. Hopefully we will have one more operator in SM3UZS in the future. That together with that SM2UVU likes to join us is great, now we might not have an operator shortage anymore!
CQWW WPX Contest, CW
Call: SJ2W
Operator(s): LB3HC SE2T SM2LIY SM2WMV
Station: SJ2W
Class: M/S HP
QTH: Da Traesk
Operating Time (hrs): 48
Summary:
Band QSOs
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160: 73
80: 96
40: 536
20: 1831
15: 462
10: 45
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Total: 3043 Prefixes = 1051 Total Score = 5,904,518
Club: Worldwide Young Contesters
Comments:
Horrible propagations, we had about half of last years score. Barely any DX runs
except a bit on Sunday but nothing even close to spectacular. This one is a
contest we will decide to totally forget.
We had LB3HC as guest operator and he did a lot of operating and was a nice
addition to the team.
Our concept of working QSOs S&P on the running band need to be improved. We
had IMD issues with the preamp for the vertical located 500m away. So we had to
put attenuation before it and could only copy the very strongest signals. So I
will pull out 7/8" coax and start thinking about having a better antenna
system there too. Only about 400Q was worked "inband" because of
this.
Thanks for the QSOs!
Antennas
160m: 39mh vertical
80m: 4-SQ
40m: 3/3el + 4-SQ
20m: 6/6/6el + 5el + 4el @EU
15m: 6/6el + 5el
10m: 6/6el + 6el @46m
QSX: Vertical 500m away for listening to the same band
Radios: 2xFT1000MP MKV + TS480
Amps: 4CX1500B + ACOM 2000A (Sponsored by Ojojoj Music AB)