This page contains my results and experiences from my participation in the Jan 2003 ARRL VHF Contest.

I am a relatively new ham (less than one year now), and I have participated in a few contests, but this was the first time I took is "seriously" and worked virtually the entire contest. It was a LOT of fun.

I am located in FN25, just west of Ottawa, the capital of Canada. For this contest I operated Low Power, single operator.

Here is the station that I used for  the contest:

My station  consists of a Yaesu 847 for 50/144/432 and a ADI AR-247 for 223 FM. I used a Rascal interface to the FT847 connect to a IBM ThinkPad 390x laptop. For logging I used N3FJP's VHF Contest logger. The straight key I used is a Nye Viking,, and I used a Heil Pro Set headset.

     Here is my mini "antenna farm" that was used.

It consists of (from top to bottom) Cushcraft 4 element beam, a borrowed 6 element 432 beam, and a homebrew 220 dipole made of 3/4" aluminum tubing. This is all mounted on a small rotator secured to my second story deck. I am on a hill with S-SW exposure, so this adds 30 or so "virtual feet" to my 15' high setup setup Unfortunately my 432 beam, or the feed line, developed a problem before the contest started, so I used my Diamond V2000a vertical on my roof for 432 SSB work.. not ideal but it worked for the locals.

For 6m SSB operation I used a Par Omni horizontal Loop on my chimney, as seen in this picture:

Here are my results from the contest:

Resulting in a total claimed score of 4104.

Here are the grids I worked:

From the above you can see that there was a nice 6m E's opening on Sunday afternoon to the East coast and into the South. It lasted almost 2 hours, allowing lots of great contacts. My longest 2m contact was K3EAR in FM19.. nearly 600 km!! All of my contact were via SSB. I tried to make a few via CW, but did not succeed. This was the first time I did any real 2m dx.. what FUN !

I learned a LOT in this contest. I learned that you should practice your logging software BEFORE the contest starts, and I also learned that you should listen for a few minutes before you transmit.. I guess I just got caught up in the excitement !

I was able to work a few local, non contesters on 432 and 144 FM.. for the next contest I will try to setup scheds with these guys to make sure I work them.. every contact counts !!

I also tried some JT44 and FSK441 without any success, for the next contest I hope to setup from digital mode scheds as well !

I have lots of projects to complete before the June VHF contest including building a 220 yagi, fixing or replacing the 432 yagi, replacing the rotor, and getting a voice and cw keyer setup. I think I will also build or buy a footswitch. Hmmm.... and maybe a tower.. ;-)

73,

VA3NFA