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Winter 2007 Issue |
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VHF Contesting By Dave Bell, W6AQ |
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For an ARRL September VHF QSO Party several years ago, I found myself back at W8JJO’s Michigan lakeshore hideaway, ostensibly helping him winterize his antennas, which consisted mainly of cranking down and tilting over his very, very old 55-foot EZ-Way tower and “nesting” the fiberglass elements of his 3-element SteppIR rotary beam (4 elements on 6 meters). Before that happened, however, there was the weekend of the QSO party. Would I be able to get all of the winterizing done on Monday and Tuesday, my last days on the lake before flying back to Los Angeles? Would it rain? Should I risk foul weather and operate the contest on the weekend? One guess. . . Brad’s radio is an IC-746, which has both 6 and 2 meters. While I think he has never used it, he has an M2 7-element Yagi underneath the SteppIR at about 55 feet. That was the station—4 elements on 6 meters and 7 elements on 2, low power. In the proud tradition of my departed pal Lew McCoy, W1ICP, allow me a small digression. I’m not a demon contester, although I enjoy it and have been low-band contesting off and on for probably 30 years or more. I’ve just recently gotten into VHF/UHF contesting. I’ve participated in maybe a dozen of them, all from my home station in the hills of Hollywood. I started my ham career in the late 1940s with an SCR 522 (if you don’t know what that classic old VHF rig is, you’re not really an old-timer), chatting with a pal of mine (now W8CY) in my quaint old hometown, Andover, Ohio. Up until a few years ago I hadn’t been on VHF since then except for some now and then HT activity. I’d been thinking about expanding my HF horizons for several years before I ran across a brand-new Yaesu FT-736R at the TRW swapmeet. It was clear that the great ham radio spirit in the sky was telling me that now was the time, so I bought the rig. When I got home that day my wife asked me if I had found the coax connectors I’d gone for, and of course I said that I had, omitting the fact that they were on the back panel of the FT-736R. Pretty soon I was checking into nets run by the Western States Weak Signal Society, which, depending on frequency, had anywhere from a dozen to 50 check-ins. While looking at the WA7BNM website for upcoming contests, I read that a VHF contest was imminent, and, never having been in one, I thought it would give the rig, the op, and the antennas a good workout. I figured that given the number of net check-ins, there would be lots of activity in the contest. Well, there was . . . and there wasn’t. What I discovered was a huge pile-up on 144.200, the calling frequency. The rest of 2 meters had a few—a couple really—stations calling CQ, but easily three quarters of the contesters were parked on the calling frequency, now and then to be driven off that prime spot by a KW calling “CQ North” or otherwise locking up the frequency. Then, and only then, did some campers move off the calling frequency for the empty quiet of virtually anywhere else on the band. |
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