What happen in Field day 2002 with OK2KKW ?

In few words - as in Murphy's law.

Krusne hory mountains invites us with nice weather and within all the contest we have not any strong rain or storm. Due to nice weather we finaly erected our new mast. Although mast is higher, we elevated it up to 20 m for first time and as we believed, it help us a lot, especialy into west direction...

At Friday evening (because at Friday was holiday in OK) new mast has been already erected with our 10 m long KLM 17 LBX, as well as second, untill this contest main mast with old Tonna antenna. At the same time as well 70 cm antenna has erected and so we can sit around fire... (from the left Majka OK1DYX, Lada OK1DIX, sitting Jarek OK1KN and David OK1RK - the others, OK1VPZ, OK1TEH and OK1XNG came little bit later).

At Saturday morning 23 cm dish has erected and we trust in a success. But a cold shower came already within first 10 min of the contest - new 144 MHz PA has broken. We changed an operation to the second, older and smaller one and start to try fix it. Unfortunately we found, that all "arrows in the transistor" for negative grid pre voltage has pull of... Because on the contest hill is production of new "wooden" transistor a little bit problematic, we used the same one from 23 cm PA, what does not help to OK1TEH indeed.

But even after change of this transistor we were not able start up this new PA. Later on we found, that because of mistake in the construction of PA, high RF voltage has made "overjumpings" of high voltage in the pass through capacitor what resulted damage of this device... Well, because we can not fix it, new PA was stay in the role of furniture only and we continue with small PA only. Unfotunately with this handicap we are losing more and more compare to the others.

Fortunately after that we start up again 23 cm PA and due to it new QSO on the 23 has increased a bit faster. But final cold shower came at Sunday early morning. New antenna rotator on the top of new mast has blocked. So for us practicaly definitive end of the contest... In Sunday we made aprox. 120 QSOs more, but it can not change anything o our feeling, that 144 MHz result is debacle.

On 432 and 1296 MHz (operation was the same as on the pictures here and here) we made relatively standard result, but because of low presentation in DL as well poor conditions to the west and higher activity in east, where we have ad profile due to the Klinovec massif, we are not eligible compete with the other stations, which have in this direction free profile (for example OK1KIM, OK1AR e.g.). Although of this "nature" handicap on our quite nice result on 23 cm one novelty has participated - OK1TEH is already CW operator as well !

After all proably would be interesting for you, why we are not able to make so good tropo DX QSO to the east as the others - below is comparison of the profiles from us (Spaleniste), OK1AR, OK1VAM (Klinovec) and OK1KIM (Lesna). For profile calculation comparison we used Bezdez hill near Mlada Boleslav (NW). Simply for better results we need Klinovec remove by excavator...

Preliminary result of OK2KKW in July Field day contest 2002:

144 MHz , 565 QSO and 162 000 points, best DX : YT0A 970 km

432 MHz , 304 QSO and 85 500 points, best DX: YU1CF 865 km

1296 MHz , 93 QSO and 19 500 points, best DX: PA6NL 630 km

Our logs from the contest are here.

We hope to meet you in the next contest.

73! OK1VPZ