W1AW/5 IARU 2002

de WM5R

Each year in the IARU HF World Championship radio contest held in July, IARU member societies are allowed to operate a ``headquarter's station'' that can operate the contest on multiple bands and modes simultaneously. Each HQ station counts as a contest multiplier, as well. In the United States, W1AW is the HQ station of the ARRL, our IARU member society. In recent years, the League has allowed the W1AW operation to go portable. In 2002, the W1AW/5 operation was assigned to the Central Texas DX and Contest Club and I was able to operate at one of the six networked locations from which the operation took place. The station I operated at was at the home of K5TR, a UTARC alumnus.

Ken Harker WM5R on 20SSB and Jennifer Sims W5JEN on 80SSB

The K5TR station hosted two band modes for W1AW/5 in the 2002 IARU HF World Championship. K5TR, K5NZ, N5TR, WM5R, and W5JEN operated on 80 meters phone and 20 meters phone. Getting the station operational before the contest took a lot of work. On 20SSB, George planned to have five monoband yagis available. Four of the yagis would be NW3Z-design OWA yagis with six elements on a forty-four foot boom. Two of these were fixed in a stack to the northeast. The other two would be on a second tower in a stack to the northwest, although the top yagi could rotate, if desired. Most of the time, that antenna was left pointing to the northwest, although some operators used it to beam due north or to the southwest. A fifth yagi was a smaller, four-element Cushcraft monobander on a 32' boom that was fixed to the southeast. Getting all five antennas on the two towers took months of hard work, scrounging for the appropriate diameter tubing, building side-mounts, and several weekend days for installation. The final yagi was bolted in place on the evening of July 7, just six days before the contest.

For 80SSB, George hung three sloping dipoles from his 120' tower, one each to the northeast, northwest, and south. On the 90' tower, George hung another sloping dipole, pointing to the north. All of these antennas were installed or moved into their contest locations in the final week before the contest. To help reduce the noisiness of reception on 80 meters, George had three Beverages available - one to the northeast, one to the northwest, and one that was supposed to be bidirectional east and west. Unfortunately, that final Beverage was the last to be installed, and never really worked right. Fortunately, that was the least important of the directions, and most U.S. hams in Florida or southern California could be heard well enough using the NE or NW Beverages.

Overall, the amount of work George has put into his station to get it ready for this and future contests is impressive. In the past eighteen months, George has built five towers and filled them with monoband yagis for 40, 20, 15, and 10 meters, as well as the 50, 144, 222, and 432 MHz bands. Putting up one 44' long yagi is a lot of work - getting four into the air is a big commitment!

Mike Hance K5NZ and Ken Harker WM5R showed up at the station on Friday night before the contest. George had taken the day off from work to finish up the outdoor antenna projects: sloping dipoles on 80, Beverage work, phasing lines for the 20 meter stacks, and more. The day was very humid and warm. Texas has been experiencing an unusually wet early summer this year, making it difficult for much of the month of June to get any outdoor antenna work done - most evenings were either raining, threatening electrical storms, or the ground was too muddy to work in.

Having completed the outdoor antenna work, George and company set about to get the station interior ready. One necessary task was rearranging switch boxes from the single-op, two-radio setup to a better configuration for two single-band efforts. Another was installing a W9XT contest card inside a PC that George borrowed from work. It was so hot outside that removing it from the back seat of the car required gloves! Unfortunately, one task that proved exceptionally difficult was getting a voice keyer to work on one of the radios. After a couple of hours of work on the problem, it was eventually realized that it was not the W9XT card or the cable, but the radio itself. The receiver completely died, and there may be other problems as well. This led to some fast and furious brain-storming about a replacement. Knowing the resources of the other teams as a result of the planning process, it was realized that the W5KFT station would have at least one spare Kenwood TS-850SAT. George called W5KFT, explained the situation, and secured the loan of the spare radio. As the W5KFT location is over sixty miles from K5TR, Bryan W5KFT agreed to meet Mike K5NZ half-way at a grocery store parking lot in the town of Marble Falls. By 1AM, the replacement radio was hooked up and ready to go. The team was asleep by 2AM.

Two 20M yagis at K5TR

Saturday morning came much too early. At 6:30AM, the video crew of KK5MI and N5OAK arrived to get some early morning shots of antennas and last-minute station setup details. The contest started out with Ken Harker WM5R on 20SSB and Mike Hance K5NZ on 80SSB. George was still tweaking software and making last minute adjustments to the station for the first hour of the contest. For 20SSB, the contest began at a good clip, with a 165 hour and a 125 hour, working mostly W/VEs, but the occasional JA. One surprising thing that happened in the first hours was that the hams in the tiny nation of Singapore provided us with three multipliers: first with the R3 multiplier from 9V1UV, then the SARTS multiplier from 9V9HQ, and finally the zone 54 multiplier with 9V1RH!

Being about a half hour after dawn, 80SSB got off to a slow start. The first six hours on 80SSB, in fact, saw an average rate of fewer than ten QSOs an hour. Many of those station were local contesters who worked W1AW/5 early in the contest and were persuaded to move to other bands and modes. The 80SSB operators during the day did their best to try and convince callers to work us on 160, but an unfortunately common response from those who were not regular contesters was that the station had no antenna that would load up on 160 meters.

Two additional operators showed up during the day to relieve the sleep-deprived crew that began the contest. Jennifer Sims W5JEN helped out with 80SSB for most of the rest of the day, asking every station that called if they would work us on another band. Having the QSO information from the other stations available in real time was a tremendous asset to this cause, as it enabled the operator to make more targeted suggestions about where to ask the station to move to. Peter Nance N5TR kept the rate up on 20SSB when he arrived around mid-day. N5TR and K5TR used to contest together a lot in the mid-1980s from the N5AU multi-multi superstation near Dallas.

Around 1500 UTC, as 15 meters began to fade a little, 20 meters became the dominant high band for the rest of the day, and the 20SSB operators were kept busy. The team made nine straight hours of 100 or more QSOs. The only other time that 20SSB made more than 100 QSOs in an hour was a 104 hour from 0200-0300 UTC in the local evening. 80SSB struggled all day, with eight consecutive hours of fewer than 10 QSOs. Many of the QSOs that the 80SSB team did make were stations that first worked W1AW/5 on 40SSB and were convinced to try another QSO on 80. One notable exception was a gentleman who seemed to imply that it was somehow unseemly for a prestigious operation like W1AW to be operating on a dead band during the middle of the day. "It just seems kind of odd," as he put it.

Things picked up again for the 20SSB station in the local evening, with the team making one 100+ hour, as well as several hours with 80 or more QSOs. the rate on 80SSB took off with the setting of the sun in the 0100 UTC hour. QSO rates peaked in the 0300 hour with a 72 hour, and stayed above 30/hour until 3AM local time. Only a few Europeans were worked on 80SSB, mostly British stations, and mostly near the European dawn during enhanced greyline conditions. The 20SSB station saw respectable rate all night long, with only one hour of darkness below 60 QSOs.

During the contest, the only equipment failure was a 20A 13.8VDC regulated Astron power supply that began to show signs of failing rectification. The 20SSB radio which it was powering began to pick up AC hum characteristics in the transmit audio that identified the problem. A switching power supply was put in its place, and fortunately, concerns about it being heard by the 80SSB radio turned out to be not a problem. None of the three computers running the logging software experienced any problems, and the station never had to shut down for thunderstorms. All of the antennas, with the exception of the east-west Beverage, played extremely well.

The K5TR team wrapped up the operation about a half hour after local dawn with a 72 QSO final hour on 20SSB and a 12 QSO final hour on 80SSB. All told, the 20SSB station racked up 2,319 QSOs and the 80SSB station an impressive 444 QSOs. Neither station limited itself to a single frequency for CQing during the entire contest. As situations and propagation changed, both stations moved to better CQ frequencies.

The team was taken care of very well during the contest. Most of the operators got opportunities to sleep or nap on one of three futons that converted from chairs or sofas into beds. The team dined on handmade chocolate milkshakes Friday night before the contest, hamburgers and chips for lunch, and beef fajitas with rice and beans for dinner. Sunday morning, George took the team into nearby Dripping Springs for hearty breakfast tacos... except for K5NZ - who ate nothing but broccoli and tofu all weekend. Everyone agreed that it was a fun weekend. Even George, with decades of highly varied contesting experience under his belt agreed, "Now I can check this one off my list, too."