The 2025 June VHF Contest was one I was actually pretty prepared for – something that rarely happens. A few weeks before I’d taken the time to make sure the coax bin had everything I needed in, with extras in case of breakage, and all of the transceivers were put together, this is a pretty easy task any more as the 7100 is in my car full time, and I run everything else through transverters and an IC-705. I remembered to get batteries on the charger the night before, and check that antennas were all in good shape, I’d been working some crazy hours all week into the contest and hadn’t had a chance to run and grab a pack of replacement nuts for my roof rack, and a replacement U-Bolt for one of the antennas, but Home Depot is right down the road, so I figured I’d go in the morning, and I would be ready to go!
I slept in a little bit, but no big deal, I took off to Home Depot grabbed what I needed, after 45 minutes of looking around for it (and a small detour to look at a few things for some work around the house that needs to get done), I headed back home, grabbed some breakfast, combed through emails to make sure I wasn’t going to overlap with any other rovers based on my plans, and started to get setup! I got the roof basket all set, and began to mount the antenna rack only to not quite remember how I’d been doing it the past few years… the rack just didn’t quite align the way it usually did, and I couldn’t figure it out. I fumbled around with it way longer than I should have and eventually got it in a way I was comfortable with – something still just wasn’t right with it, but it was secure so that’s all I cared about. I had to reassemble the rotor and mast as I’d taken everything apart to clean it up after last June and of course spend 20 minutes looking for the right size bits as tools wind up scattered around our house, but eventually everything got together. I got the antennas mounted, and we were ready to head out – only about 45 minutes behind schedule, which is good for me.
On the way out I grabbed a quick lunch, this one of the few times a year I grab a McDonalds Burger (I don’t know why, but that has just become my tradition on the way out to the first Grid at this point), and headed down to FN12, about a 20 minute drive from the QTH. I decided that I wanted to see how 6m was performing and try and figure out where to call, so I booted up WSJT-X to gauge the band, a bit of rather local DX in there, but also a small path to FL, so I let out a few CQs. Nothing on the first few goes, so I decided to pivot over to 2m SSB and take a scan through the band. I caught someone on the first go around, and we ran the bottom 4 – first 4 contacts in the log, and it only picked up from there. I ran the bands with a few of the club members, and a handful of other stations, and finally decided that I should probably get 10ghz setup, so while I was getting that back together, I flipped back to 6m FT8 and hit CQ (multitasking at its finest). I had a few stations call back, so I worked them before working a sked on 10ghz and running the bands with a few others I knew. Activity started to die down around 5, so I flipped to 6m FT8 again and picked up a couple of other new grids, next thing I knew I looked at the clock and I was about an hour behind my schedule, so it was time to start packing up again. I used the same exercise with working FT8 while breaking down, finished up the Q’s and packed up. N2OA and I were unable to make a contact on a few of the higher bands, so I tried moving to another spot and working him again, but he was a bit busy running with someone else, so after waiting a few mins I decided to move on to the next grid.
I grabbed a quick protein bar and iced tea from a gas station and headed down to FN02, it was about 6:30 when I finally got settled and on the air, I was having some issues with 222 and 902 that I needed to work through – 902 wound up being a connector had either jostled loose on my ride out, or I’d wound up not tightening it enough in the first place, and 222 was just plain dumb – in getting the transverters hooked up, I’d connected the radio to the incorrect port. Luckily no harm was done, but this could have very easily blown the transverter – it was still mixing, and I was still receiving/transmitting on 222 (validated with another transceiver), but this could’ve very quickly been the end of that. I repeated the same process that I did in the last grid, but started with getting 10ghz setup, and then hitting SSB, and working FT8 while doing it. Only tried to sked one or two stations, and the rest were fairly natural finds. My highlight from here was working FN14 with VA3ELE/R – we were both sort of at the end of our times in the grids we were working for the night and had started to pack some stuff up, but I happened to catch him on 2m, so we ran down to 6m, and back up the bands into 10ghz. I ran a couple more voice contacts, and as I was logging N2OA on 10ghz, I realized that I’d been logging everyone on the incorrect bands above 2.3ghz due to the way my radio was interfacing with N3FJP and the way I had to log some of them manually. On the bright side I was logging everyone pretty consistently – with 3.4 being logged as dupes on 2.3ghz, and 10ghz being logged as 5ghz. A fairly easy mistake to correct, but I’m hoping I caught them all.
About 9:45, when my laptop battery hit life support, I decided to call it a night – the one thing I did forget was that my good AC inverter had died, and I didn’t order a new one. I had one sitting at home that was enough for my laptop, not for my rotor, but at this time of the evening it wasn’t worth driving 40 minutes round trip, I decided to call it an evening.
I was up and back out the door a little later than planned again, not getting to FN13 until about 9:30 – I practiced the same exercise I did with the other grids, became my standard when arriving: boot up the laptop, fire up FT8, see how 6m is doing while setting up the microwave portion, and then either work the band for a little bit, or move on. In this case I decided to stay on 6m FT8 for a little bit, working down into EL98, FN00, and other grids I sometime miss, and trying to score some additional multipliers. After about 45 minutes of doing this however I moved on to calling on 6m Voice and caught a few stations down in EN’s and some other EL grids – we had a nice pipeline to FL for a little bit again, but then I had the locals calling me back and sending texts/slack messages. So I decided to start running some of the bands with them as we were now encroaching on 11am. I worked with them for about an hour, running through my list and finishing up around noon – after that I pivoted back to 6m voice until around 12:20 when I decided to start breaking down. While doing that I made a couple more FT8 contacts, and headed out.
After grabbing some Moes for lunch and catching a bit of the Blue Jays game, I tooled around a little bit trying to find somewhere different in FN13 to park for a little bit seeing if I could get a better shot to the Northwest. I tried one new one for a few minutes to try and work N2OA again, and we grabbed two more bands that we didn’t make from the last spot. From here I ran home really quick to take the pup out and then headed back down to FN02 in a different spot to catch some of the home stations that I’d missed the day before. Upon pulling into the parking lot and getting out to make sure all was well with the antennas I was greeted by a curious father and son out for a walk – we talked for about 20 minutes or so, an interesting character who was apparently a former ECHL player and grew up down the road from there. I caught a small handful of home stations from here, and even a few rovers that I’d been missing, and after about an hour headed back to FN03 to close out the contest.
I pulled into my spot in FN03 to be greeted by an S9+ noise floor on 902mhz – not great but was able to move away from the QRM to the other side of the building and take it down to an S2-S3. From here I spotted myself on a group, and that I was calling CQ on 50.170 to direct others to me instead of trying to coordinate the barrage of messages that I usually get – it didn’t really work and I still wound up with numerous texts, calls, and DMs trying to setup a sked. I worked my way through the list again, working up to 10ghz with a couple of stations. After this, 6m was still pretty open, so I popped on SSB for a little but, worked that continuing pipeline to FL, and a couple of stations in Massachusetts, but then wound up back on 6m FT8 for a bit. Another rover that was a mile or so away drove over to pay a visit and we chatted for a little bit about how the contest was going, and any other plans for the evening.
9pm hit, and one problem with roving is that there are often times no bathrooms or trees to duck into, so there’s no ability to make a quick bathroom run – the later it gets you start to weigh your options – do I pack up, make the run down the road to the gas station, come back and set everything up again? Or, do I just need to call it a contest? I opted for the latter in this case. I did a quick drive by of a station that I’d previously missed from that site that should’ve been an easy Q and headed on home.
All in all, this was probably the least number of problems I’ve ever had in a contest, antennas all stayed in tune and affixed to the vehicle, despite early issues getting them mounted. Radios functioned well, and there was minimal RF getting back in, which can sometimes be a problem. Traffic was light, and sites were all clear, avoiding interference with other Rovers! With an end score of just over 26k points, I can say for sure that it was an improvement over last year’s contest, but there’s still some work to do to clean things up and make band switching more effective in the future.
I do want to propose an agreement to all of the locals before the next contest, if 6m is Open, and you and I could work on an HT any day of the week, I don’t want to contact you on FT8. For me, FT8 is a tool in the toolbox for unique grids and mults, not for the casual easy Q’s. For that we should be using voice, it’s faster, and much easier to QSY and just run up the bands.
I’m considering operating September, something I rarely do, but as a Portable station from a hilltop for something different – I may try to go entirely off of Solar for entertainment value too, but I’m undecided right now. Here we sit almost a week after the contest as I’m writing this, and I still haven’t had time to take the Rover apart yet! At least if I’m busy after a /P operation, I’ll be able to keep everything compact and together.
I did record a lot of video for this contest, so I may post something over on YouTube as well, so if you don’t follow me there give a search for @knutekjc and you’ll see me!
Thanks for reading, and catch you all next time!
Roving On 