I am so tired! (Getting to our site)
Posted: Jul 9, 2006 19:59 PDT

Been awake about 42 hours now... a quick note before falling asleep.

The station draw started Friday morning about 10am. Always a lot of anticipation and anxiety around this as the luck of the draw can have a major impact on your chances for success.

Teammate W2SC selected an envelope that gave us station #13. This is far to the north and will require some driving to get to. Our referee is Ivan, YU1LA. We have worked many times in contests and it will be fun to have him along on our adventure.

Selection meeting ends at 11:30am. They have a bus planned to take all of the northern competitors up to a central meeting point where the station hosts will meet us. Announced the bus would leave around 12:30pm.

Pick up our amplifier and antenna switch from WRTC HQ. They say our station already has the rotator box. Get rest of gear and arrive at the reception area at exactly 12:30. All of the competitors have a lot of gear, so it is good to see a very big tour bus pull up.

Find out the bus is scheduled to depart at 1:30. Spend hour waiting - knowing this is only the first part of a multipart trip. Decide that we have to relax and go with the flow Brazilian style.

About 1pm, someone from organizing committee finds us and gives us a rotator control box. Whew. Would have been bad to get to the station without that!

Bus ready to depart at 1:30, but two Russian guys are missing. No idea where they are. At 1:45 we pull away without them, but are flagged down before we leave the parking lot. Russian guys get on board.

Drive for about 45 minutes to get to mainland. Stop at BIG grocery store (that really is the name - "BIG"). Nothing worse than turning a bunch of contesters loose in a store with no plan and no ability to read the package labels. Buy some strange stuff. Doesn't help that we have no idea about what is available at the site we are going to.

Back on bus for 2.5 hour drive. Nice to see the scenery, but it is now obvious we won't reach station before dark.

Stop at an exit and 4 teams get off bus. We drive away leaving them standing at side of road with some taxis. Hope they find their stations!

Arrive at Joinville. Go to CRAJE radio club (PP5CIT). They have very nice club building. This is the operating location for SM0W/OZ1AA. Hills in most directions.

Our host arrives, but does not have room for all of us and our gear. We get a taxi to follow. One hour drive to the station. Finally see our site at 7:45pm (some of the teams with sites on the island had their stations set up by 2pm!).

Ivan and Andrew go out to find food (return with pizza - yum!). Tom and I get to work building a station. Finish about midnight.

Our station is in a condo complex. We have the end unit and the antenna is just south of the building about 50 feet away. Ocean is 300 feet from the antenna and we can hear waves breaking on beach through the windows. It is ideal set up!

We use the kitchen table as the operating desk. Coax cables are run in through the kitchen window.

Plug in radio and test antennas. 20m seems to have funny SWR (something may be intermittent, but doesn't cause any problem on receive). Listen on 80m and first signal we hear is RK3AWL very strong. He comes back to us! Also very happy that there is no line noise. We are very very excited and motivation is high.

No changes are required to get the 80m antenna resonant on CW band. Use some string to pull the ends of the antenna as high as possible.

Go to bed but have trouble falling asleep because mosquitos keep attacking. There had been no bugs in Florionopolis so I left my repellent in the hotel. Bad mistake.

Woke up around 5am and decided to get up. Couldn't fall back asleep anyway. Do more final setup work. Tom wakes up about 6am and we do more RFI debugging. We are fully ready about 8am and get a few minutes to relax before the contest.

At 8:50am, Ivan gives us the envelope containing our call. We are happy to get PT5Q and quickly program it into WriteLog.

More about the contest next time. Sleep now...!

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