The Minnesota QSO Party was this last weekend, and Dave KZ9V and I participated in the event from a park (POTA US-4236) located on the banks of the Mississippi River. This was our 4th foray into the contest and this year’s operation was markedly different than what we’ve done in the past.
You can watch this week’s video on the MN QSO Party here: https://youtu.be/s9GsAP-32bQ
In previous years, we’ve gone mobile for the QSO party. We would drive from county to county, making contacts along the way, with prolonged stops at Parks on the Air entities to rack up the points. The advantage of using POTA for the mobile operator is that when you spot on the Parks on the Air network, you suddenly have a giant influx of hunters looking for you. This method worked extremely well and for the 2024 contest we has honed it to the point where we won the Rover category.
But there was a problem. In the MN QSO Party, the rules only allow for one transmitter at a time in the mobile and rover categories. That means one person is pretty much relegated to driving and the other operating. If we stop, then the driver is idled while the other person is making contacts. Dave wanted to get into the action of the QSO party, so we where at the point of a strategic decision.
This year, while still operating out of Dave’s truck, we decided to just go to one park in one county, and compete as a multi operator station. Now we could have the benefits of POTA spotting while keeping two transceivers on the air. This is a bold move as instead of competing with other mobiles and their compromised antenna systems, we are in direct competition with the big guns and their home stations. To put forth a competitive score, we really had to think hard about our setup.
The first big decision was location. We chose a boat landing along the Mississippi River, it was accessible, had a low noise floor, and plenty of space to put up antennas. We had been to that spot in previous years, so we knew it would work well.
Next was antennas. Again, we need to be competitive, so Dave, who would be primarily on 40 meters to work the in-state stations, was on a 40 meter end fed half wave antenna. My goal, was to work out state and to rack up contacts on 20 meters, so I deployed the POTA PERformer antenna. These are probably the two least compromised antennas that the portable operator can put out, so they fit the bill.
Third, we had to deal with interference between the two transmitters. Working in close proximity of each other means that you will receive a certain amount of interference. We mitigated that by using band pass filters on each station, and we added coax chokes and line isolators on the coax at both the feed point and where the coax enters the transceivers. This knocked the interference down to almost nothing.
Finally, how are we going to handle logging. Dave likes the N1MM+ contest logger as it has macros that speed up CW operation during a contest. I’ve got no problem using N1MM, and we recently found out at Winter Field Day that networking the application is dirty simple. So I set up an inexpensive travel router in the truck and fed it with a battery pack. We tethered Dave’s Jetpack to it so we had wifi networking and full internet while we operated. That means we could fully assisted just like the big guns.
So how did everything work? Of course the video will tell you, but we put on one heck of an effort. Looking at the preliminary results on 3830 scores, we blew it out of the water and are competitive with the other big operators. We were expecting to go even higher, but propagation was marginal for most of the day, and reading accounts by other participants, it appears that band conditions suppressed many of the final outcomes. We’ll see in a few weeks when the official results are released, but we’re confident that if we aren’t the multi-op category winner, we will at least be in the top two. Not bad for guys working out of a truck.
Before I wrap, I want to remind everyone that Thurday February 6th at 7pm CST is livestream night. Please join Joe and I as we answer your amateur radio questions and talk about other ham radio stuff. The link to the February livestream is here.
I hope to get you in the log soon,
Michael
KB9VBR
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