3830 Soapbox Comments

Call: AC0C

Operator(s): AC0C

Station: AC0C

Class: Single Op HP

QTH: Kansas

Operating Time (hrs): 23

Summary:

 Band  QSOs

------------

   80:  208

   40:   83

   20:  565

   15:   24

   10:    0

------------

Total:  880  State/Prov = 56  Countries = 46 

Total Score =  89,658

Club: Kansas City DX Club

Comments:

Posted results passed the ARRL submission bot.  

The contest was great fun.  The first 9 hours were uneventful with good Q rates, especially in the first few hours.  Then, while running on 40m about 0300 Sunday, the bad luck came in waves.  

My MFJ988 auto-tuner started hissing and crackling - traced this to a series of poor solder joints on the inductor traces.  After getting the tuner fixed, about 5 minutes later, the amp glitched and did so hard - blew both the main amp circuit breakers, the anode line fuse, and exploded the glitch resistor.  It checked out otherwise and so I replaced/reset everything and it fired up fine. 

But strangely, the tuner seemed unable to find a match - the antenna is resonant on the CW portion so it made no sense.  Some further checks indicated a fried 30m trap pushing the resonant frequency too far out of range --> net result was no more operation on 40m.  I suspect the trap death was the catalyst for the amp glitch - and given the solder joint conditions, it was in the walking-wounded category from day 1. 

And with a -18C temp, the trap problem was definately not going to get fixed.  Fortunately, following the hasty repairs on the tuner and amp, the hardware ran perfectly for the rest of the contest.

Ran 80m the rest of that evening. 

The unanticipated downtime for hardware repair meant only 3 hours of sleep.  Next morning, I discovered I must have ate

something bad the day before - fortunately there is a bathroom just off the shack operating position - so the first 4-5 hours of Sunday AM were hampered by nausia and bathroom breaks.  20m started to open up about 7:00 AM with loads of DX coming in.  Ran 20m most of the day but Q count (either run or SP) dropped badly in the afternoon.  By then 40m was open but I was out of action there. 

Had to settle for extended runs on 20m and 80m but I beleive if I had 40m functional, I could have added an extra 100-200 Q.  Lot of JA and a ZL came in right at the end of the contest providing a nice end to an otherwise challanging 2 days. 

Despite the hardware and body problems, it was a great way to kick off the new year.

73/jeff/ac0c