2025 ARRL June VHF

The last big contest outing for the rover was Sept VHF last year and the only notable change since then has been a new main station battery bank. Out with the off the shelf SOK batteries and in with a homebrew eight cell LiFePO4 pack. The old batteries were older non-heated versions which proved troublesome for January VHF and didn’t provide all of the monitoring / integration options that I’d prefer. After evaluating several options I just decided to build it myself because I apparently didn’t have enough projects already. There is still work to do on the monitoring and integration, but it is a stable power source with builtin heating when needed and has more capacity than the previous SOK batteries.

Once again, I really didn’t have any great plan on where I wanted to go for June. Leading up to the contest Chris NV4B/R reached out asking what my plans were as he was thinking about heading up to my neck of the woods. After some back and forth, I decided to start on Taum Sauk Mountain in EM47 on Saturday to hopefully catch Chris on his trek north and then move up to the EM49/EM59/EN40/EN50 corner on Sunday when Chris was planning to head out of my usual general area. Also, with recent good propagation on 6m, I was kind of hoping to sit and run more than drive this time around.

The drive to Taum Sauk Saturday morning was wet and there were a few brief showers while I was getting setup, but given the forecasts in the days leading up to the contest, that didn’t seem bad. It quickly cleared up though and the rest of the day turned out to be great. Better than I expected from the weather forecasts.

Right from the start of the contest, the bands were great too. The June 6m contest was in full effect. Tried to start on 6m SSB, but it seemed as if it was going to be another contest of a full FT8 frequency and an analog ghost town, but that eventually turned around. I managed a decent little SSB run on 6m later in the day which was great. Unfortunately Chris ended up getting a late start on his journey north so I didn’t end up getting any Qs with him on Saturday. No worries though, there was plenty of other activity to keep me busy all afternoon and into the night. I eventually decided around 2230 local that if I didn’t leave I was going to be sleeping on the mountain. Packed up and headed home since it’s on the way to my next grid anyway and finally settled down around 0100 local for some sleep.

I probably should have set an alarm and been on the road a little sooner Sunday morning, but I had made the drive to the EM49/EM59/EN40/EN50 corner, got setup, and was operating again by around 0800 local. As others have observed, 6m was not as good on Sunday and only got worse as the day passed. The only plus was that left more time to find some Qs on the upper bands that tend to get ignored when 6m is rocking. By early afternoon 6m was all but dead and I found myself moving to new grids just to get a “reset” and have something to do since everyone is new again. When it finally got down to what looked like the Qs were going to be hard to come by and still having a couple hours driving ahead of me, I threw in the towel.

All in all it was a good weekend.

Until next time… thanks for the Qs!

Gear:
Flex 6600 / Q5 Signal 5BVUX
50 - 200w - 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’