I teamed up with Rich AA2MF and Tom W4CU from SPARC and FCG for the North American QSO Party RTTY July contest. Our team name was THREE-FIFTHS, since we couldn’t find the 2 others to fill out the team. Turns out those missing two were smart, Rich emailed after the contest and said it was the worst, “It was like my antennas were disconnected”. I’d have to agree with that statement. I set out to get more contacts than in the February version of this contest where I got 254, I didn’t even get close with 139. Along with terrible band conditions, there was an hour long lightning storm that sat right above the house and poured down right in the middle of the contest
After dealing with the noise at night on 40m in the last contest I made a change in the wiring and connected the other port of the Alpha Delta splitter I use to ground the Hexbeam when I’m not using it, to the MFJ-1026 Noise Cancelling device’s noise antenna port. This effectively allows me to use the hexbeam and a receive antenna on 40m (and 80m) and use the OCF dipole as transmit. It also gives me more knobs to turn, it may have gotten me 10 more contacts or so, but it was really just a bad day for contesting.
