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Texas QSO Party 2003 - K5NA/m
Sept. 28th, 29th 2003 - Lampasas, TX.This year, Richard, K5NA and myself decided to activate a bunch of countiesfor this year's Texas QSO Party. We entered the Texas Mobile Multi-Op category. Originally we discussed getting a trailer and hauling all of the antennas mounted to the trailer, but we had a hard time finding a decent trailer that was A) not all rusted out and B) not $50 per day. After an exhaustive search, we decided to stick with roof-mounted antennas. We also tried to work in a pair of Texas Bug catchers. Initially with the trailer this would have been OK. However, due to our "final" working of the roof rack, we opted for the lighter weight of the Hamsticks and opted not to go with the bugcatchers. I put together a rack for mounting hamsticks for 15 / 20 / 40:
...and attached it to the roof of the van. I grounded it to the chassis using one of the roof-rack screws, and ran the coax through the hatch. We eventually found a problem with the bracket for the 15m hamstick - it had an intermittent grounding problem, and we ended up moving it to the Mag Mount for the remainder of the trip. The 20m and 40m Hamsticks worked very nicely the entire weekend. We also employed band-pass filters and a WX0B SixPak to allow us both to operate simultaneously without interstation interference, and to switch bands easily without passing coax back and forth. This worked out great!
We originally planned on using Richard's Yaesu FT-847, but it took some damage from lightning a few weeks earlier, so we ended up using both Icom 706's and remote tuners for the trip. After getting on the road Saturday morning we found that any RF transmissions messed up the C-IV interface for TRLOG connecting to Richard's 706. TRLOG had a difficult time reading the frequency when Richard was transmitting. Whenever I transmitted on 40m SSB, Richard's would have to watch for when I unkeyed before he could press <ENTER> on his laptop. After messsing with Ferrites for a while, Richard decided to manually send CW for the entire trip. He did this while I was bumping down the highway! Here's Richard's setup in the back of the minivan -
and my setup -
Yes - I drove and logged at the same time. We tried to find a driver to come along and help drive and operate, but got no takers. We started out Saturday morning in Lampasas County. This was our Official Route. John, W5RQ was our official coordinator for CTDXCC and had several maps made up with several different routes. Richard and I drew the West-Texas route, while KC5YKX Reid took South Texas, K5CWR took the Panhandle, and N5TW and W5RQ took East Texas. Our route took us through 23 counties and around 800 miles. We got an early start and had breakfast in Lampasas, then hit the road by the beginning of the contest. Throughout the day Saturday I tried getting a run going on 15 or 20m, and could not generate anything significant. Richard, however, had no trouble using CW to keep things humming on 15 and 20m, so I basically stuck to 40m SSB and worked all the other Texas and Oklahoma stations on the air. This combination worked out pretty well. About 30 miles short of Brady Texas, disaster struck! All of the power to the rigs went out. Prior to the contest I had run brand new 8 guage wire directly to the battery, and installed dual-fuse holders and 45-amp fuses to both + and - so we could run two HF stations at the same time. I pulled the fuses out and visually inspected - they looked fine. We decided to drive into Ballinger and look for a Radio Shack and get a multitester. The ***ONE*** box we decided not to bring with had our multi-tester in it. When we got to Brady, we actually found a combination Radio-Shack AND Supermarket all-in-one! After some troubleshooting we found that the fuse had in fact shorted out, but not in the middle where you can see the element. Apparently, the Solder holding the ends against the metal casing had melted BEFORE the 45Amp fuse went out. Bad fuses???? Fortunately, I had a spare, and we were back on the air heading west.
After stopping for Dinner and checking into our hotel, we continued South from Sonora and headed down to ValVerde county. We spent quite a while activating Edwards and ValVerde, and as the contest was coming to a close for the evening, we started the 45 mile trek back to the hotel. Unfortunately, we AGAIN lost all power at 7:45pm to a fuse, and decided to just head back to the hotel and tackle it in the morning.
Sunday morning and a quick breakfast, and we hit the road. We found that the replaced fuse was AGAIN the problem, and after replacing it, we had no spare fuses. We replaced the fuse with the last and final spare. To prevent any problems during the last part of Sunday, we decided to run 70 watts each, hoping that this would reduce the current draw on the fuse and prevent us from losing power again. I didn't think that wrapping it in Aluminum foil would be sufficient to handle the current! We drove South through Edwards county and staged for the beginning of the contest just East of Rock Springs. We worked our way to REAL county, then continued North through Kerr and Kimble counties. Knowing we only had 6 hours operating time on Sunday, we had a goal of getting to Williamson County to activate our 24th county for the Extra credit points. We came through Llano and Burnet and crossed into WMSN with 12 minutes to spare! Overall, we drove around 860 miles.
More photos of the trip - Picturesque.....
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