Salton Sea ARC

From 220 feet below sea level, the Lowest Down Amateur Radio Club in the Country

 

2004 California QSO Party

 

Your club’s first event was the CQP over the Oct 6 weekend. The QTH was at my old duck club 1 mile west of the small Imperial Valley town of Niland. The town holds the ignominious distinction of having the lowest per capita income in the State.

 

 

The Clubhouse is at least 50 years old and maybe a good bit more, but it does have two working air conditioners. That was good because the high temperature on Fri and Sat was over 90º and it was 102º on Sunday. Here’s the Clubhouse.

 

 

 

 

The first job was to erect the antennas. I had built and tested the 20-meter Moxon in my front yard but, importantly, had not erected it at home. Mistake!

 

 

The Moxon is built using 20 foot long crappie poles which are very light in weight. The total antenna doesn’t weigh more than 7 lbs.

 

When I tried “walk it up,” that 7 lbs. created enough of a moment arm that the mast cracked at 2 of the ferrules. Obviously it was not the way to put it up. A two-person crew could have pushed it up.

 

So I ended up mounting it atop a 12 foot pipe.

 

 

 

This was not the best height for the Moxon but it did perform well and I got 579 reports from almost everyone I asked. Probably would have been 599 had it been 28 feet up.

 

I used some duct tape to put the mast back together and erected it with a pulley on top and a rope so I could hoist my wire antennas.

 

I had planned to make 40-meter beam, an inverted Vee dipole with a similar reflector on another mast, the MFJ telescope, 16 feet behind the driven one. Sadly, I had little experience in erecting this and instead of “walking it up, I just picked it up and started to lift it. Mistake! It broke in two places, even though there was very little load on top, like less than 1 lb.

 

 

I brought along a dipole made of 450 ohm ladder line, but I couldn’t get it to resonate anywhere near 7 mHz, not would it tune with my balanced line tuner. So I get a balun and quickly threw together a 40-meter dipole. Resonated about 6.95 mHz. Cool.

 

Next I erected the 80-meter Bazooka, throwing one end over the clubhouse and securing, and tying the other end to a tree in the back yard. Tuned just fine. Cool.

 

 

 

Here’s what the bazooka looked like.

 

Finally I erected my “back-up antenna,” a Sigma 5 vertical and the one I was going to use for 15-meters, and for 10-meters if it opened up.

 

 

So I was pretty well ready to go. I went inside and started to set up the station. Oops! Remember that this clubhouse was electrified many years ago, long before grounding and sockets with a ground. Every outlet was two-wire one while every electrical cord I had was a three-prong plug. So it was off to the hardware store in Calipatria, 10 miles away. Next time I’ll take along a ground rod and some heavy-duty wire.

 

Finally, got back, got everything connected and was on the air. Here is what the ”shack” looked like. The call sign was N6IMP. Cute, eh? I thought that might be better for the CQP than AA6SS, the main Club call sign.

 

 

 

Did a little testing and it seemed as if everything was working OK. I hit the sack about 10PM and, of course, had a real problem getting out of the stress mode and did not sleep well.

 

Started out the contest at 9AM with a pretty good run on 20 meter CW, 67 Q’s in the first hour.

 

Things slowed down of course and the Q-rate varied between 30 and 50 per hour. I switched back and forth between 20, 15, and 10 CW, with a few forays into the Phone end of the band when I thought I had exhausted the CW possibilities.

 

Things finally got going when I went to 40-meter CW with 100 Q’s in the first hour. Tried some phone on 40. Nil. Went to 80-meters where I found most of the CA stations talking to each other! Didn’t talk to many stations East of the Rockies and none East of Ohio. Finally went to bed, again all nerves firing so had trouble sleeping again.

 

Got up the next morning and tried again. Basically didn’t get many more than 30 or 40 Q’s per hour and it seemed as if most everyone had talked to everyone else. So I hung it up after 20 hours with the following results.

 

 

 

Band   CW Qs     Ph Qs
--------------------
160:
80:    113           32
40:    255            4
20:    133          46
15:    83            24
10:    64            10

 

Tot   648          119
--------------------
Total: 767 

 

Multipliers = 53

 

Total Score = 115,646

 

I missed Maine , Rhode Island , North Dakota , Hawaii , and Alaska .

 

As you can see, my Phone skills are severely under-developed. Perhaps I didn’t have much confidence there either and didn’t spend enough time properly to exploit what might have been.

 

On balance, with the antenna debacle, I think that was a respectable score. It certainly would have been higher with better signal. There IS something about some of the people who operate a contest casually where they contact the strong signals and then quit and go watch football or something.

 

I did make DX contacts with the only 7 that I heard – DL, OK, I, JA. LY, and EA – but Club Member Bob AA6PW worked over 40 with his better antennas. They were there. I just couldn’t hear them!

 

I do think that this was too ambitious a task for a solo operator and I didn’t take enough prep time to make sure everything worked before loading up and taking off.

 

Perhaps we can have a REAL Club outing with more members participating. In fact, we should consider doing an operation from the West Shore of the Salton Sea to take advantage of all that salt water! How about phased verticals on all bands? But let’s do it from some place that has more creature comforts!

 

Your comments are invited.