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!
