Contest… Contest? What Contest?? – Breaking & Fixing Things 28 - October - 2007
Posted by k9zw in Amateur Radio, K9ZW Just Rambled, K9ZW Learned, US Islands.Tags: Contesting, K9ZW, W9EVT, Washington Island, WI-001L
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Ok, so from the start the CQ WW contest was never a main objective of a rapidly planned run to W9EVT’s QTH on Washington Island WI-001L.
But who would have planned for high winds requiring the towers to be down, extended rain to add to the fun, a laptop hard drive that went “ping” within hours of arrival, finding the Yaesu FT-950 DIN pins have nothing to do with any other Yaesu product making the cables I brought along useless to run a linear, sudden serious tower troubles with one tower that put the Mosely 96S, Bruce Array and Loop off line, and a couple bad commercially made co-ax jumpers that gave false SWR errors on certain otherwise good antennas while they were in use?
On the plus side I did get a fair bit of time with the FT-950 and a wonderful combination of the Ten-Tec Omni-VII and Expert Amp. Also spent quite a while operating the IC-7800.
The TimeWave AntennaSmith came in handy, though the foul weather kept towers down and operators inside so we didn’t get to work with the Riserbond TDR and the ex-Military Megger.
More over the next couple days after I unpack and sort something out for Laptop repair.
73
Steve
K9ZW
I’d be very interested in a review of the ft-950 in a contest environment, as well as opinions of how it compares to the Omni VII. The Omni VII is a delight.
[...] – December – 2007 · No Comments The crank-up tower problem on Washington Island had taken down the Bruce Array I had built for [...]
Please note that apparently the SPE Expert 1K-FA amp is currently not available in North America. As of November 15th 2007 Array Solutions and SPE went their separate ways.
More on this in a post in the next week or so.
73
Steve
K9ZW