John Moyle Field Day Contest 2020

VK2NJP, VK4ICE and VK2FCES.

LOCATION: QF44W049

RADIO: Kenwood TS590S

TUNER: MFJ969

GENERATOR: Honda EU10i

Dave’s Trip VIDEO

Location: Durran Durra just North East of Braidwood on the Southern Tablelands.

We arrived about 2:30pm Friday afternoon after having lunch at the Nerriga Pub on the way up,

On arrival at the property checking in with the property owners and partaking with the usual welcome including afternoon tea accompanied with the usual homemade cake and biscuits!

We then proceeded to our usual site unloaded our 3 vehicles as this year we were travelling light  ha-ha. We were unable to set the antennas up in their normal location as the area was full of fat lambs and we didn’t won’t to have any problems guying our main antenna pole.

This tale is going to sound like everything went wrong…..which essentially, it did to start with!.

Anyhow, the Diamond W-8010 was placed at right angle over the top of the fence in inverted Vee configuration, (because we are all told that crossing conductors at 90 degrees minimises interaction), it just would not tune correctly.

Saturday morning, I swapped it out for another W-8010 and same result. Swapped again for the Radiowavz 40m Double Bazooka dipole…. And even that would not tune. The common denominator was the pole….or the location (fence).

(After the event was over, we turned the 40m double bazooka 90 degrees so it was running in the same direction as the fence…. And it tuned perfectly. Swapped out, and quickly hauled up the original W-8010 and leaving the 20/10m wires rolled up at the feed point, then ran the 15/40/80m legs in line with the fence (inverted vee fashion) and it tuned pretty well.)

We used the PAR 40m half-wave end-fed vertical in the tree. Having thought about it now, I should have used a 49:1 end fed with 66 foot radiator vertical, which would have given us 40m, 20m, 15, & 10m as a vertical.

Second antenna….

We started with the 49:1 FT240-43 in a PVC pipe as the 80m antenna, (135 feet of wire) with options of using it on other bands if needed. It was over 60 feet above the ground when in position, wire running roughly east/west, so broadside north/south.

10 minutes before the start of the event, final testing revealed a high SWR on the big end fed.  We dropped one end and put a dummy load on the antenna end and found the cable/connector faulty. This cable was made on site, so I had to accept the blame fully. It seems the PL-259 crimps for RG-58 do not like to have a long cable weight hanging on them so this 50m cable run had to be replaced, so the transformer was swapped out as well.

The second transformer was a 49:1 (FT140-43) end fed half wave fixed to a cable winder with the same 135 feet of wire. The winder was easy to fit strain relief for the cable too. I was a bit worried that the duty cycle of contesting might show flaws in the design…. But it is air cooled being in the open air, It performed flawlessly. SWR was up a little on 40m but we just ran out of time…. So it was tickled with the tuner.  Being 135 feet long, it is a half wave end fed on 80m. Working the harmonics, it is two half waves on 40m, four half waves on 20m and six half waves on 10m, all with close to a 50 ohm match to the feed line.

WE WERE READY WITH ONLY MINUTES BEFORE THE START OF THE EVENT!

 Performance

The vertical wire on 40m was outstanding. Most…. Not all….stations were stronger on the vertical on 40m. Into Tassie, the vertical was the clear winner on 40m.

We would call on the 40m vertical…. When we ran out of stations, we switched to the horizontal end fed, call, and work a whole bunch of other stations…. Like changing bait! The vertical was worth the effort.

80m….. the long end fed was amazing with huge signals from most stations. We did have a couple of 20m contacts on this antenna too.

THE CONTEST

Although we had a troublesome setup we also lacked the same propagation of previous years,

102 contacts on 40 Mtrs, 44 contacts on 80 Mtrs and 2 contacts on 20 Mtrs.

Thanks to Dave (VK4ICE) coming down from Brisbane 2 years in a row and many thanks to Cyril

(VK2FCES) who did most of the cooking and supplied numerous coffees!

All up we had a great weekend and came home on the Monday morning, we are already planning for next year’s John Moyle but will be leaving MURPHY at home next year!

John VK2NJP