Adventures on QRP Afield: The AA5Backpack Expedition
Special to The ARS Sojourner
It was QRP Afield, and here's a quick summary of my single operator operation:
182 QSOs total. 119 QSOs on Saturday, 63 QSOs on Sunday. 64 S/P/C multipliers.
Final score: 125,440.
I found out about QRP Afield when Tom Wahlen, WB5QYT and Bob Applegate, K2UT forwarded the announcement. I'd been looking for a chance to use my QRP+ and new DK9SQ mast in a contest, and this was it.
Backpacking this time of year in the nearby Sandia Mountains can be spectacular - the Aspen trees are starting to turn colors, and the crisp Fall mountain air feels great.
I got up very early on Saturday morning and put together a 20/40 fan dipole, but didn't have time to test it. They are simple dipoles, cut to formula, so what could go wrong? Yeah, right. The contest starts at noon here, and I arrived at my campsite at 10:20 a.m. lugging 2 backpacks on my shoulders: A frame pack with about 25 pounds of camping gear and food, and a large day pack with about 25 pounds of radio stuff.
At 10,500 feet, I was above the layer of morning clouds. The view from this ridge is spectacular: I can see about a hundred miles to the north, west, and south. There is a dense growth of short trees blocking the view to the east, but the mountain falls off quickly in that direction so it's not a problem RF-wise.
I had the tent set up by 10:30, and started to assemble the 20/40 dipole. I quickly learned something that's not mentioned on the DK9SQ mast web page: The top 3 or 4 feet of the mast is not usable for holding up the feed point and balun for a dipole - the top section is pencil-thin material and can't support much. True, it's fiberglass and probably won't break easily, but it bends a LOT!
Think of it as a pole vaulter's pole . . . it bends a lot when there's a good force at the top. But in this case, it was like a sumo wrestler had decided to try the pole vault! I moved the feed point down to the 29-foot level and things looked fine. By 11:05, the clouds had moved up to my level (an eerie feeling), and the mast and antennas were up in the air. By 11:25 a.m. the station was set up in the tent.
At 11:30, I discovered that I had almost no output power on 20 meters. I suspected high SWR, but had nothing to measure it. Forty (and 15) seemed to work just fine. Luckily, I had brought along a 20-meter wire vertical and extra RG8X, so I installed it and four elevated radials in the trees. I had used this ground plane antenna before in a testing session at the same site: It had worked OK, but never better than a dipole at 20 feet. Must be something about the rocky "soil," mountain ridge, and trees. Anyway, it loaded up fine and by 11:55 I was ready to roll . . . just as the clouds evaporated!
NOON: CONTEST TIME
The 20 meter vertical seemed to work fairly well (I worked 4 stations in the first 3 minutes on 20), but I wanted to hit 15 meters before it soured. The 15 meter band never sounded very good out here, but I worked 10 guys in 8 states in the next 20 minutes, then went back to 20 meters. Then I heard a bang, bang, bang outside . . . the mast had collapsed! The telescoping sections are held together with friction fittings, and I guess I hadn't applied enough oomph. Nothing was broken, and I got it back up in just a couple of minutes.
A little before 1 p.m., WB5QYT showed up and let me use his tuner/meter to troubleshoot the bad 20 meter dipole. In the course of messing around, I found that simply adding about 5 feet of coax allowed the transmitter to see a decent SWR and put out 5 watts. That was great news, because I was sure that a dipole would be better than the ground plane antenna, based on my experiments a couple of months earlier. Switching back and forth for a few minutes confirmed that to be true again this time. The first hour ended with 23 QSOs in the log. Not exactly burning up the bands, but not too bad considering all the problems I'd had.
By 2 p.m., my hands were getting cold (it was about 50 degrees outside), so I put on a pair of bicycling gloves . . . the fingertips are cut off, and they allowed me write and key pretty well. Yes, I used paper logging and hand-keying (Bencher, iambic) the whole time. Didn't want to carry a laptop and batteries.
Tom, WB5QYT, set up his station nearby and made some QSOs too, but decided to leave because he didn't like the looks of a cloud moving in from the west. His instincts were right: By 4:30 p.m., I had lightning, thunder, wind, rain, and pellet snow! For almost an hour, I was in the clouds and the noise level on the dipoles was too high to hear any signals, but the vertical was perfectly quiet. Go figure.
Saturday's session ended with 119 QSOs and 51 multipliers. Score about 48,000.
40m: 23 Qs, 13 mults. 20m: 69 Qs, 23 mults. 15m: 25 Qs, 13 mults. 10m: 2 Qs, 2 mults.
At 6 p.m., when the session was over, I ate and put on two more layers of clothes. It was a cold, very windy night on the ridge. Temperatures got down to about 45 degrees, and I'm sure the wind gusts were 30 to 40 mph.
The Sunday morning session netted me another 63 QSOs plus 11 new multipliers, and more than doubled my score. I also got plenty of practice sending "/P" several hundred times with my cold fingers! While I think a second session is a great idea (it allows us to work everyone again and with different band conditions), maybe it would be better to have everyone on the air at the same time instead of staggered (the session was from 7 to 11 a.m. LOCAL time). The east coast guys weren't allowed to work west coast guys for the first 2 or 3 hours; then the west coast guys didn't have anyone left to work for the last couple of hours. Awkward. How about a UTC start time, and maybe a nighttime session next year? Yeah!
Anyway, the winds were getting to be terrible, there were very few people left to work, and it looked like more storm clouds were coming, so I quit an hour early. I had everything packed up within an hour and was back on the trail.
SOME POST-CONTEST NOTES
1. Yes, I agree that we should spread out on 20 meters. But every time I tried CQing below 14058, I got very few answers. And above 14062 is filled with packet. Got to go where the action is, 14059-14061.
2. I need a very small low-drain memory keyer. Any suggestions?
3. My QRP+ has a big AGC overshoot problem. Strong signals really kick it, and it takes 1 or 2 seconds to recover. Meantime, the receiver is deaf. Is it just my rig, or is this a known QRP+ problem?
4. Except for the fact that the top section isn't very useful and it weighs a pound more than advertised (hey, that's important when backpacking), the DK9SQ mast is absolutely wonderful. It's a "must-have". Maybe I can talk him into making me a 50 or 60 footer! The web site: http://www.qsl.net/dk9sq/tbild.htm .
5. The Bencher paddle is very heavy. Is there a small, rugged, iambic paddle with a good feel out there?
I'll see all of you again next year, I hope.
God, I love this stuff!
* * * * * * * * * *
Bruce Draper, AA5B, who lives in Albuquerque, NM, is an avid QRPer, outdoorsman and former editor of the American Radio Relay League's publication National Contest Journal. A photograph of the author is at http://www.vramp.net/~aa5b/w3pp.htm.
