va2wdq
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Re:CQWW 2015 - 2015/11/30 12:27
Operator Category : SINGLE-OP
Assisted Category : ASSISTED
Band : ALL
Power : HIGH
Band QSOs Pts ZN Cty
1.8 270 637 15 55
3.5 987 2477 23 92
7 878 2258 34 118
14 1383 3571 40 139
21 535 1344 31 115
28 89 218 22 61
Total 4142 10505 165 580
Score : 7,826,225
Time on: 41H
Finally the Murphy have visited me in this contest. On Saturday morning I've noticed my SteppIR yagi SWR slightly increased up to 1.5-1.8 depending on band. My Alpha showed me about 250 watts of reflected power from 1500 watts of forwarding power. So I decided to continue using it. But on Sunday morning the SWR jumped up to 2 and lately up to 3 and then 4. So I've stopped contest and started invetigation. I cheked up all the cables and connectors since I suspected some of them got burned and started power leaking. But everything was fine. Finally I've figured out the SteppIR either control box or element drives got unbalanced. I've applied a factory default configuration. Then I did a calibration procedure few times and tried to change manually antenna geometry. The only one I did - got a good SWR 1.1 for 20m if I put an antenna working frequency around 13.800 Mhz. I have no clue about yagi directivity pattern. But I felt some directivity during rotating the beam. Not sure that F/B parameter was as good as it was before. Couldn't get some quick fix for 15m and 10m. So I lost two bands - 15m and 10m 6 hrs before the end of the contest. That probably costed me at least dozen un-worked mults. That took me about 1.5 hrs overall. Finished that contest by using the only 20m and lower band antennas. The 20m condition was beautiful. I've got all the 40 zones on it for the first time. The 10m was almost closed with just a few very weak western EU stations. The 15m was very tough giving few spots of a good long skip for just for few hours. The 80m and 40m bands were amazing as never before. The 160 was below average and showed up small one hour improvement on the second night.
73!
Victor
Post edited by: va2wdq, at: 2015/11/30 13:01
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