8 contacts into the ARRL Sweepstakes CW contest I hit my 10,000th contact ever. It was with N4ZZ, I’ll send him a card. I’m still in the process of getting my old house ready as a rental so my shack is mostly still in boxes. I pulled out the bare minimum of stuff to get my Flexradio hooked up. I have a Zero-Five 10-80m Ground Plane Vertical on order and Tom said it should ship tomorrow. In preparation for it’s arrival I purchased a 21ft water pipe which I had cut down to 13ft and set it up in my yard in 4 ft of concrete. For the sweepstakes I attached my POTA spiderbeam pole with the 40m vertical to it. The vertical does real good here, I think because I’m real close to the saltwater(also hit water at the very bottom of the 4 ft hole I dug).
It’s pretty windy with the hurricane coming tomorrow or the next day and the spiderbeam collapsed down toward the end of the contest. I went out with the flashlight to try to fix it but the extension I had added to the 40m vertical speaker wire broke so I gave up fixing it in the dark. I actually made two contacts with the antenna wire all jumbled up at about 8ft off the ground. Looking forward to getting the Zero Five. I still need to drill through the wall for the coax, I just went through the window for this contest. I’ll write up another post once the new antenna is installed.
