N2MH Information For Rovers

N2MH/R Photo Scrapbook - N2MH/R June 2002, VHF Contest

Plans Updated June 7, 2002

GridPedition to Maine

Karen and I will leave New Jersey sometime on Friday afternoon and drive north until we drop. Then, Saturday morning we will drive as far north as we can and start the contest. Hopefully, that will be Cyr Mountain or "Pelletier Mountain" in FN57. If not, it will be one of the other sites in the list below.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get the Jeep fitted out with the new antennas that I picked up at Dayton. So, we have to revert back to the Subaru with its halos. However, we will take our older home brew yagi antennas with wooden booms and and try to set up at various places. Because we will be setting up and taking down (a tedious process), we will not make it to all the grids we want to. (In fact, if it becomes too troublesome, we just might bag the beams entirely.) Also, we may be limited to one band at a time on a beam. Enroute, we will try to monitor 144.250, so give us a shout there from time to time and follow our progress. Bands covered will be 50, 144, 222 and 432 MHz, on both sets of antennas. When running the bands, expect to be on .250 on all bands for the handoff.

In addition to not having our new antennas ready (6 foot rover beams from DEMI), we have had some problems with our laptop. On our trip to Dayton a few weeks ago, Mario (the laptop) decided he no longer wants to read CD-roms. I've determined that it is a hardware problem and not something as simple as a missing driver. Thus, we will have no real-time gps navigation with moving maps. I'll print out the details in advance, hopefully this will get us to where we want to go. Let's keep our fingers crossed that he holds up for the contest software (WriteLog).

Grid Coverage and proposed sites

We will try to cover the following 13 grids:

More information on locations marked with an asterisk * can be found on the N2MH RoveSite Locator page.

Itinerary

This is the order in which our stops have been laid out. Please note that if we have a successful stop in a grid, subsequent stops in that grid probably will be skipped.

Score

Band QSO's Points Grids
50 23 23 11
144 22 22 8
222 8 16 3
432 10 20 3
Total 63 81 25
Grids Activated     5
Grand Total   81 30
Final Score   2430  

Results

These results are pretty poor. We completely underestimated how far away Maine is from the areas of activity, especially just running loops for antennas.
This page last revised on September 8, 2002.
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