2024 ARRL June VHF

On the station upgrade front, practically everything has been touched in one way or another in the rover. After the Jan contest, pretty much the entire rover was dismantled. A new battery box/shelving/wall space to hang power infrastructure on was built. All new AC & DC wiring installed. New inverter for AC loads. New battery charging and DC-DC buck/boosters. Upgraded and completely rewired the rack holding the majority of the radio equipment. New automations to help manage beam headings based on rover position and heading. All of this happened over the last couple months and I’m sure there is a ton I’ve left out. All in all though, it has been a huge improvement. Much better organization and has resulted in a bunch of new usable space for other upgrades to come. There are still some RFI issues to deal with and a broken 6m amplifier, but I did manage to accomplish the vast majority of what was planned to happen between Jan & June. And again thanks goes out to Jeff, K9KLD, for all the help working on building and rebuilding the rover.

Luckily the rover was mostly back in working order the weekend before the contest, because in the week leading up to the contest I managed to come down with some kind of plague. That severely limited the motivation to do much additional planning prior to the contest weekend. Basically just did the bare minimum to be ready for the contest and came up with a basic route including a couple grid corners I’m rather familiar with and have been to several times in the past. Long story short, this became a pretty low effort contest for me because even though I was much better by the weekend, I was still not 100% and the motivation still wasn’t very high.

Saturday morning I was up early and off towards the EN50 / EN51 / EN60 / EN61 grid corner. I was all setup and ready to go in EN61 about an hour before the contest, so there was plenty of time to relax a little and even tune around the bands a bit. Unfortunately the bands would be all but dead pretty much all day long. The weather was absolutely amazing though. It is always great to be able to open all the doors of the van and operate with a nice breeze blowing through. Then, just as I was getting ready to pack up and start heading towards the next corner for Sunday, a very loud signal appeared on the waterfall of the Flex. Turns out it was K9JK/R that had showed up at the corner. After a quick eyeball QSO with John, he ran a quick trip around the corner to get some Qs in before I left.

After driving overnight and a few hours of sleep in the van, I was getting setup fairly early at the EM49 / EM59 / EN40 / EN50 corner. As I was setting up the 6m antenna, I noticed that one side of the driven element on the yagi was no longer connected at the feedpoint. Apparently there was a loose screw that had worked its way out while the antennas were blowing around in the hurricane force winds while driving. Guess it’s a good thing I had at least a little miscellaneous extra hardware floating around in the van. A quick field repair later and I was finally setup and on the air again. The day started off slow, but the propagation gods were a little better to us on Sunday. Some decent openings to the east coast, Florida, and then out west later in the day certainly helped to break up the boredom.

By early afternoon the lack of rest while still not being 100% to begin with and the heat was really taking a toll on me. It was time to head back towards home. I managed to make one last stop in EM58 on the way home to finish out the 8 grid rove, but I was home early and headed off to bed to try and recover.

Until next time, thanks for all the Qs!

Gear:
Flex 6600 / Q5 Signal 5BVUX
50 - 100w - Directive Systems 3el Yagi @ 20’
144 - 200w - Directive Systems 6el Rover Yagi @ 12’
222 - 100w - Directive Systems 10el Rover Yagi @ 10’
432 - 100w - Directive Systems 15el Rover Yagi @ 8’