July 2011 CQWW VHF Contest

Bob W4ZST, Fourlanders President

The Fourlanders operated the 2011 CQWW VHF Contest from the QTH of W4ZST and once again had a great time and a good contest.

We ended up with 43,648 points operating on 6 and 2 meter for the contest. This was almost as high as last year. On 6m we had 286 Q's and 107 grids. Two meters had 33 Q's and 17 grids. Pretty much like the June contest, when 6m is open, 2m suffers.

Jim W4KXY was the 6m band captain, equipped with his FT-2000 for the radio, W4ZST's 6m Commander amp to tickle the ether and the usual stacked pair of 5 element beams and the stacked 6m HO loop omni's. Both played well and we had no problems with the 6m set-up after we had readjusted the omni's the weekend before. Some late night 6m WSJT FSK441 contacts were made by Jim during the wee hours to increase our grid total on 6.

Scott NN4W was the 2m band captain and used his K-3 with P-3 panadaptor and Elecraft 2m transverter along with his newly refurbished "Plumbers Delight" 2m amp. There was a problem with one of the TR relays during the contest, but otherwise the equipment performed excellently. Ron's 2m back-up amp was used after the relay problem was discovered. For antennas, we had the stacked pair of 2m12 beams up, along with Scott's HB 2m omni's. We also had set up a pair of CC 13B2's vertically polarized on an AZ-El rotator to experiment with 2m EME. This set-up worked great and we made 5(6?) Q's off the moon on 2 meters for a real high light to this contest. We won't mention to anyone that we just used RG-213 for the feedline to the EME antennas!

Operators for the contest included: Jim W4KXY, Scott NN4W, Bob W4ZST, Kos N4NIA, Skip K5AWC, Tom K4TJD, Ron WW8RR, Kim WG8S and Brian NX9O.

All these ops stayed over on Saturday night. We also had Dusty NR4N operate on his first visit to the W4ZST SmithHill contest site. Other visitors included Jeff W0ONR, Chris W4ONT, Mary W4MWP and their son Lee whose call I have lost and Jack K5SFE and Charlotte also came Saturday evening to watch the activities and have dinner with the group.

We had met as a group at Rooster's for lunch on Saturday before the contest and had a cookout for Saturday night dinner with all the above mentioned ops and visitors in attendance. The grill was going for folks to cook their burgers, dogs, sausages and steaks to go with the salad and baked potatoes prepared by W4ZST. Scott also cooked about 8 pounds of wings which were immediately consumed by the group in typical Fourlanders fashion. We had pancakes and sausage for brunch on Sunday and skipped ordering pizza as we had originally planned for lunch.

Everyone was pretty tired and the original plan to go to the Mexican restaurant for Sunday evening petered out too.

Thanks to Brian and Kim for assembling my new 222FO16 antennas during the contest when they weren't operating. Some other items got worked on also since there were ample operators for the two stations.

73, Bob W4ZST, Fourlanders President

July 31, 2011



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