WRTC 2000

I was very proud to be the representative for the Mad River Radio Club. What follows is a few items that I thought might be of interest. As time permits, I will update this area with more information and pictures. If you have any questions or things you think would add to the page, please email me.

Not familiar with WRTC 2000 or want to know more, go to http://wrtc2000.bit.si/ for more information. This location also has all of the scores, logs, UBN reports, pileup tapes, etc.

Pre-Contest

Since the WRTC format is two person teams, my first order of business was to find a partner. Since I really don't know many people outside this area, that made it a little tougher. However, there were plenty of people who wanted to attend this event. So as with any project, the first thing I did was pull together the requirements. An abbreviated list follows...

Find a strong CW op who also knows which end of a microphone one talks into

Find someone who had been to a previous wrtc

Find someone I thought I could get along with

Find someone with experience from EU

Find someone with a proven contest background

Find someone to do the pileup tape (I'm not fond of these personally)

I had a list of about 15 names, well calls actually. Some discussion with K8CC provided a check of who I had on the list and we were in agreement. With this in hand I set out to call up folks and see what happened. As it turned out, I never had to go beyond the number one pick on my list. A phone call to Steve London (N2IC) and I had a partner who met all of the requirements.

With the team members in place we exchanged emails and phone calls for several month trying to decide what equipment to take and discussing strategy. We decided that getting together for a contest would be a good idea. It would give us a chance to meet each other and operate together as well as finalize the list of equipment to take to Slovenia.

WPX CW was the target contest for the get together. The original plan was to operate from my place. The thought was that my place came the closest to the station we would end up with in Slovenia... that is a tribander and wire on 40/80. The problem was that a couple of weeks before Steve came, my tower and antennas were messed up beyond use by a storm. Fortunately for us the multi effort from K8CC fell apart. So we went to Dave's for the weekend.

After running the first ten hours or so with my call and low power. We decided to get some sleep and start in the morning with another call and QRO! I wish I had a dollar for every time Steve lamented about how things were not as loud as at KC1XX. Boy am I glad we didn't operate from my place. At least Dave had big monobanders/stacks at heights exceeding 100'. The extra power helped but did not make up for all the things we don't hear that the east coast does.

We ran the WPX contest as if it were WRTC. We counted multipliers the same as wrtc and scored the contest under the wrtc rules. This also gave us a chance to test the WRTC version of NA. During the weekend we passed things along to Dave and he made additions and corrections based on our feedback.

We decided to go with IC-756 radios. I had one and Dave had another that he was nice enough to lend us. This provided a soulution that could be hand carried on the plane. No worries about airline luggage loss/delay. Less worries about damage and no excess weight charges. While Steve would have liked to take his 950SDX and I would have preferred my 1000D or 1000MP... we felt this was the best solution. We also decided to use our Dunestar bandpass filters. That was about it for equipment. We felt there was no need to take external DSP boxes or a voice keyer (we thought the rate would be high enough that this wouldn't be a problem).

The Trip to Slovenia

I set off for Slovenia a few days early. I spent a couple of days with my sister in London. This allowed me to visit with her and to get adjusted to EU time. There were no direct flights to Slovenia so I decided to make my stop over in the UK. This turned out great.

On the 4th of July while folks in the states were getting ready to party, I was on a plane from the UK to Slovenia. I bumped into the UK team, the Cyprus team and K9ZO at the airport. The plane ride went without a hitch and a couple of hours later, we were in Slovenia. Amazingly enough all of our luggage made it as well.

After clearing customs and immigration we were met by members of the Slovenian Army holding WRTC signs. We were loaded into military vans and driven to Bled where the hotel was. At first it was a bit intimidating to be met by the army. We see so much about the fighting in that area of the world on TV (of course the fighting isn't in Slovenia but Croatia borders Slovenia). The guys were not armed so that made it a little easier.

After a half-hour ride to Bled, we were dropped off at the Astoria Hotel, otherwise known as headquarters. We were lead into the office area that was setup for WRTC. Here we were processed for the hotel and given our bag of wrtc goodies. There were four computers for our use which had internet access so we still had a link to the outside world via computer.

The patio of the Astoria was like a who's who in contesting. It was like starting at the bottom of the band and trolling up the band only you got to see the face that went with the call. Many stories and 807's were swapped on the patio of the Astoria... not shortage of BS either.

There were several things that were very striking to me about Slovenia. The first was the mountains. The second was the amount of green. The third was the number of tribanders and other amateur antennas that one could see while driving around the country. Soon after our arrival another thing struck me, how cheap and how good the food and beverages were. Of course the friendliness of the Slovenian people was also striking.

Before the Contest

There was no shortage of things to do between our arrival and our departure to the contest site. Steve arrived a day after me on Wednesday. We spent time making sure all the radio stuff made it with no damage, walking around Lake Bled finalizinig our strategy and of course visiting with other judges and competitors. For Steve it was a chance to meet old friends, for the most part. For me it was the chance to meet folks for the first time in person. We also tried to find out where our QTH was.

The judge and QTH drawing took place before all of us arrived. We knew that our location was near Maribor but that was all we could find out. The WRTC program that was made up had pictures of most of the sights... but not ours. We were not sure if this was a good sign (like they didn't want other to be jealous) or a bad sign. We found our judge Jiri (OK2RZ) and tried to find out what he knew about the QTH. Unfortunately he was not aware of anything more than we were. It was an anxious time.

We also had that pesky pileup tape thing to deal with as well as several meetings on rules and other items.

We met Branko (S52V) who was our station host at the opening ceremonies. As it turned out our location was at his house (a number of the stations were temporary locations). Branko was a wonderful host. He drove us to his house on Friday. His station was a homemade crankup tower of 30 feet. It was of course setup with the same tribander as everyone had and the windowm for 40/80. The area around where we were was hilly but not mountainous. The mountains were to our North West, West and South West. Things were fairly flat to the North East.

We took over one of Branko's kids rooms in the upstairs of his house. We setup the station and ran some initial checks. Things seemed to be working with no major problems. Some on the air comparisons with other stations left us scratching our heads. Seemed that several other stations, most noteably Harry (UA), kept beating us out. There were several stations we called that we never did work. Only to hear Harry work them. Then Harry's partner. Then Harry's station host. Then Harry saying please listen for my friend S5/N2IC. Just like in real estate, radio is also all about location, location, location!

About an hour before starting time a big problem was discovered. Fourty meters had some real bad QRM from what appeared to be the computer power supply. After some really tense time of trying to debug this, we found that the shield on the windom was bad at one of the connectors. Fortunately Branko had some spare coax and I had brought along some spare PL259's and a new cable was fabricated and put in place minutes before the start... and the problem went away! (whew).

Contest Time

Here comes the rain! More importantly, here comes the rain static! It was at best S9 and most of the time near S9+20dB. This made the high bands a real challenge. Not only were we weak from being 100w and tribander but now we couldn't hear either. What we wouldn't have given for a stack so that we could listen on the bottom protected antenna. We tried listening on the wire and antenna and no doing there either.

We could not seem to generate a pileup on CW or SSB. We had to resort at times to something we thought we would never have to do... the dreaded S&P. On the plus side with the rate slow, it left time to work mults inbetween run QSO's. The problem was that many of the stations we were calling were multi KW and monobander guys we were hearing on scatter and they apparently couldn't hear our signal.

Having been chased from the high bands we tried going to 40m. As soon as we went there, a bad RF in the keying problem cropped up. Where did this come from? This wasn't there before the contest. It was a frustrating time as I haven't used a paddle in years (I normally use keyboard mode). I was extremely challenged to send our call at 40 wpm with the paddles (S's and 5's and 4's and V's oh my). So I hopped out of the run seat to make room for Steve to struggle with the keyer while I tried to solve the RF problem. Just about this time Steve gets a run going... what a fire drill! After some experimenting and addition of grounds and toroids, the problem was fixed. CPU keying was restored... thank god.

All night long we struggled with the rain static and lack of runs. We knew that we needed to be on the high bands and should be able to run... but it just wasn't there. We could do a decent business on 40m but it was not where we needed to be. So after operating the first 12 hours, we took a break.

When we returned, finally a little after sunrise the rain slowed. We could hear better and a run to the states started. It was very exciting, the run fest was finally going to begin. Then after about 20 minutes, back to cq'ing our brains out with few responses. Change modes, and boom there was the run again. Yeah, allright. Then it too dried up after around 20 minutes. Back to the grind almost like SS on Sunday afternoon. This was not at all what either of us had expected.

We were concerned about the last couple of hours of the contest. We had figured based on the logs we reviewed before the contest that this was prime time to take off. We knew there was a chance that the bands could open to the states but thought that it was slim. Appears that we were wrong? Although it is unknown if we would have had the opening or not. Some of the people who had the opening had other openings that we didn't so it is difficult to know?

Steve and I were so frustrated after the contest that we were trying to have shirts made that said "S574V, we SUCK". It was extremely disappointing to me at the time. After having more time to reflect on it, there really isn't much that I think we would have done different. We did the best we could with what we had. After seeing all of the scores, there were several other people who were in the same boat we were.

After the Contest

Upon returning to the hotel, K6LA was keeping a 3830 of sorts on his notebook. He would take the scores and rank them in an Excel spreadsheet. This only added to the frustration as most of the intial scores that he had were the top scores. Oh well, back to the ice arena for dinner (they had rented out an ice arena that was near the hotel where we could get together for dinner and meetings).

On Monday after the contest we went on a trip to caves and also to a winery and dried ham place. It was a relaxing day to chill and shoot the breeze with other folks.

Tuesday came and it was time to head back to the UK and on to home. The flight from Slovenia to London was delayed. When we arrived in London, they sent us to the wrong gate and there were no stairs to get off the plane. So we waited and waited. Mean time my hour and fifteen minute layover was gone. I thought for sure I missed the flight home. Then when we got off of the bus at the terminal, there was a British Air agent with a sign for me and Tim (N4GN) [who was also on the same flights home]. As it turns out, Northwest had delayed our flight... so we were going to make it! We made the flight and made it back to Detroit. We waited for our bags and they never arrived. I received my bags nearly two weeks after I returned home. I was very glad that I had not checked my 1000MP's as luggage at that point!

Pictures

There were many spots for the following station throughout Europe (photo-link).

Conclusion

It was a really great time. Slovenia was very nice and I would recommend that if anyone is knocking around Europe, stop in and see the place. The people are very nice and there are tons of hams. I would like to thank Branko (S52V) for being a great station host and allowing us to disrupt his family life for the weekend. Also, thanks to his wife for putting up with us and also going out of here way to make us feel welcome and all of the wonderful food and beverages. Also, thanks to the Mad River Radio Club for allowing me to go as their representative.

73 Tim K9TM