This time I operated a VHF-UHF contest from home. It was pretty easy to set up my 222 and 432 antennas on a pushup mast in the backyard. Rotating them consisted of running down the stairs from my second floor ham shack and twisting the mast. It worked.
The logging set up posed more challenges, at least for me. I see now that I selected the wrong contest in N1MM. I chose ARRL UHF AUG instead of ARRL – 222. That meant it didn’t generate the right score and when it generated the Cabrillo file it left out the two letter sub grid that I spent so much time collecting. Even so, with only 15 QSOs it’s pretty easy to edit the file and add the needed information.
I had one SSB QSO and the rest were FT8. I was running 25 watts on 222 into 10 element yagi at 20 feet along with 60 watts on 432 into 15 element yagi. Not too bad with most activity on Sunday morning.
Thanks for the QSOs.
That was a fun contest this year. I took out my rover into EM04 at the I-44 Exit 1 in Oklahoma to start. It started out with working all the local guys that would pop up and then I made a ‘tactical’ decision. I brought my ancient Icom IC-03AT FM handie-talkie to Joel Bryant’s (N5XTR) house along with a 1.25m hourglass antenna. Joel set up the antenna on his work truck on a 20-foot mast and I took off for EM03 with my Yaesu FT-857D running 5 watts. We managed to make a 23-mile FM contact at the furthest point. In fact, we talked almost the whole way without me moving the beam.