Saturday, 3 February 2007 Underhill Ctr, VT

Seabury (AA1MY) arrived here in VT Friday afternoon. About 3 pm we (N1BQ and AA1MY) started with Seab’s  famous slingshot and put lines up into three selected trees. I would have to say that we exhausted our share of good fortune and only ‘lost’ 30 feet of fishing line and, most important, none of his precious round swivel sinkers. We finished at sundown in time for Seab to trip on a snow covered branch and update my already too rich vocabulary.

Saturday morning started off cold at 11F went up to 18F and back down to 6F. It was  a fairly nice day otherwise. It snowed lightly most of  the afternoon and the wind in the forecast never really materialized. Seab (AA1MY) and I (N1BQ) switched on and off at the key and John (VE2EQL) backed us up as a second set of ears. We ran my IC703+ with a 250 Hz filter. We set up two 176 foot doublets about 40-50 feet above ground with a good take off angle due the down slope to  the West. They were ladder line fed to a pair of ZM-2 based tuners. We set them up N-S and NE-SW. On 20 meters they had such sharp lobes that many stations heard on one simply weren't there on the other. We did some great DX; we worked JR0BAQ in Niigata, Japan also running QRP, Jim Larsen AL7FS in AK and a lot of CA and WA. We also worked NM and AZ. We had 77 QSO's  with 46 SPCs representing 34 states, 2 provinces and one DX country. We had about a half dozen busted contacts where they faded to nothing halfway through.

80 meters appeared to be heating up late in the day and we ran off a half dozen Q’s lickety split, then nothing. at 2400z we shut down. Took all the gear out of  the tent and packed it up, took down the tent, shook out the snow and packed it too. We then adjourned to the house where Sara (W1SLR) and Suzanne (VE2SZN) served up a pork roast stuffed with spinach, garlic, feta cheese and sun-dried tomatoes that made us all forget how cold and tired we were.

    73 de brian, n1bq