It is very valuable when noise conditions changes during the day. The Timewave ANC-4 has become easier and easier to setup and use.Very pleased with the 1/4 wave vertical, with the IC-7300 and received several complements on my audio quality.I worked enough “rare” states that I completed my ARRL WAS for the phone endorsement using only LoTW confirmations. I quit around 5:30pm after making a few final contacts on 40m.Īll in all, I worked the contest for only 6 hours and 33 minutes, made 124 QSO’s across 63 of the 83 available sections. I suspect that this was due to propagation changes. I struggled to make contacts initially but after about an hours they started to come in easily. 15m was open but there were significantly fewer stations. 20m was very busy and there was considerable QRM. I picked up again in the early afternoon and started working on 20m and 15m. I ran a few more contacts on 40m early on Sunday morning before I left for church service. I only made one contact on 80m to North Texas. The auto-tuner would start trying to re-tune every time I went to transmit. I tried 80m on both the vertical and the DXtreme end fed and while both tuned up initially, there were problems when it came time to actually make contacts. The 40m 1/4 wave vertical worked great.I made contacts easily and the exchange was copied 100% about 95% of the time. I started by working on 40m and spent most of my time there. At this time of day 20m and up were closed down at the QTH. I had some personal issues to deal with on Saturday and did not actually start working the contest until Saturday evening, 5 hours after the start of the contest. The 2017 ARRL Sweepstakes was this weekend. Tomorrow I’ll get the antennas ready for field deployment and make sure I have everything for the park. If I remove the battery I can run the netbook on just 700mA. I have noted previously that the current needed to charge the batteries is around 3A for several hours. I was concerned over the power budget with the netbook. Not enough time to redo the battery box so I have installed the two working batteries and charged them up during the last two days in the sun. I’ll take some backup antennas with me as well: EARCHI end fed and the 20m Inverted V. 5W on 40m got me heard in Europe tonight! 20m was already a bit slow but I made contact with K7S on SSB without any problems. Installed WSJT-X without issues and tested some FT-8. I am planning on using the Rybakov matchbox with 30 feet of wire and four ground radials on the SOTAbeams travel mast. I hookeed up the S9V31 vertical to the FT-817 as this is likely similar to what Ill setup on field day. I’ll use N1MM Logger+ to make sure I don’t have dupes. The baud rate had to be set to 38400 for the tuner to work. I also started up the Gateway Netbook for logging and digital modes. I setup my FT-817 with the LDG Z817 tuner and the SignaLink USB. I plan to get there around 11am to start setting up. Our Club will participate in Field Day at Cabler park in Brownsville. Field Day is Saturday and I have unfortunately not prepared as well as I had hoped.