“The Barnstormer’s News”                                                                         Volume 5 No.6 April 29, 2000

 

Special NU1AW News

 

The first organizational meeting for the IARU operation of NU1AW was held last Saturday, 23 April. N1XS, KB1DFB, and KB1H traveled to KI1G’s QTH From KI1G’s side there was K1SD, WF1B, and KI1G.

 

The first order of business was a station tour. Rick has a nice station and surely does well with 2 ½ towers. Lots of yagis and his shack have plenty of wooden plaques on the wall to prove his operating skills.

 

Next we broke down the bands and came up with the following plan:

 

            160 SSB & CW –       KI1G

                          80 SSB –       KI1G

                          80 CW -        KB1H

                          40 SSB -        KB1H

                          40 CW -        KI1G

                          20 SSB -        KB1H

                          20 CW -        KI1G

                          15 SSB -        KI1G

                          15 CW -        KB1H

                          10 SSB –       KB1H

                          10 CW -        KI1G

 

Both Rick and I both hope to have 4-5 stations on the air. Rick’s shack is very small so he needed the 3 CW and 2 SSB to reduce the QRM from SSB Ops sitting next to each other. KB1H has 2 CW and 3 SSB. We also looked at the strengths of each station and we know how 15 meters plays here! I wanted to make sure we got 15 CW and with the 80 Meter 4-Square we felt CW here on 80 meters would be more productive.

 

Rick is trying to recruit a few Ops and he does not usually run a Multi-Op setup. For our gang I think we will have AA1CE, NB1U, KB1DFB, K1EBY, N1BU, and KB1H. Maybes are N1LYA and W3TB. I have also mentioned the operation to a few others in case we need some more help.

The W1AW HQ station will be run this year by a group of W4s. I am sure W1AW/4 will be out to out score NU1AW. We hope this doesn’t happen. We have set our goal at 10,000 QSOs in the 24 hour contest period. Sounds like a lot but remember that we will have at times 10 stations running.

 

A huge technical hurdle to get over is the attempt to link the two sites by RF link so we can have CT running as if all stations are connected on the network. This should get the rate meter going crazy!! Also we can know by the ALT-J command what frequency all the stations are running on. It looks like we will be making this link with a pair of 6 meter radios with external 9600 Baud TNCs. Ray, WF1B, calculated that with a maximum hourly rate of 1000 QSOs we can manage with this RF link. Should be pretty neat!!

 

There is quite a lot of work to do before July 8^th & 9^th but I know as usual we will be up to the  task.

 

In other news….

 

Kim has purchased and built a new 440 Mhz. Beam. 25 elements! Looks like we are going to be QRV for the ARRL UHF/VHF Sweepestakes in June.

 

Kim also worked a LU on 6 Meters with his OWN call.

 

The 20 Meter 203BA ( 3 element HY-Gain) is being built and we should have it done this weekend. Kim made a new boom to mast plate.

 

I still am researching a source for the relays for switching our south antennas. I have found a few sources and Mark, NB1U, has also forwarded a source. We should be able to make up three or four new boxes soon.

 

After many telephone calls to Arizona, I finally found the UHF adapters for the hardline that goes to the 40 Meter tower. These are to replace the corroded and broken pieces. It looks like I will be able to get three of them sent to me as engineering sample – NO COST!!.

 

 

Enough for now.   73, Dick