The Loudoun Amateur Radio Group Of Northern Virginia & Its Radio Station K4LRG

Rick Miller - AI1V & Jay Ives - KI4TXP
Captains,   Station #2

     Jay Ives - KI4TXP of Lucketts, assisted by Co-Captain Rick Miller - AI1V of Reston, put together a fine business station for SSB on 75 and 40-Meters. This station put up some impressive numbers with Rick's new Elecraft K3 HF Transceiver and a pair of nicely tuned 75 and 40-Meter full-length dipole antennas. Twelve different single and paired teams operated this station and turned in some very nice hourly rates and the best overall QSO count. Congratulation!

     Our captains of Station #2, Jay Ives - KI4TXP and Rick Miller - AI1V, took on the job of finding ways to beef up our 40-Meter SSB and 75-Meter SSB operations. First they switch to separate full size dipole antennas and tuned them up to work nicely from a single high support. They spent many extra hours on Friday and Saturday getting them just right. This sure paid off. Next, Rick used his brand new Elecraft K3 HF Transceiver. What a baptism by fire! What a demonstration for a fine new recently introduced piece of equipment. There are at least four more K3's spread out across the LARG. Bring them next year. And then a final trick, they enlisted the help of twelve different operator teams to drive this nice set up. As you see below they ran the full 24-hours on either one of the bands and more then doubled the score that this station usually produced with over 1000 QSOs. What more can you say but congratulations!

Jay Ives - KI4TXP & Jeff Slusher - KE5APC
Hard at work with Jeff on the Mic

Dave Putman - KE4S
Single Op-ing on 40-Meters SSB

Jeff Slusher - KE5APC & Jack Brown - KI4KEY
With Chris Fristad - KT9N listening in

The Rates At Station #2     Forty started off well then they went to Eighty and that didn't last long. Maybe a north-south orientation on the closely spaced antennas would have helped or maybe it was the approaching Mid-Atlantic storms that shut down a lot of folks. Then there's the European broadcast stations that start to appear an hour or so before sun down that drives you nuts on 40-SSB. You need to find a sweet spot to work the mid-west. Anyway, they didn't go back to forty till 11 PM. We must have been the only station on at sun rise. Look at the hourly rates. Guess we should have tried 80-SSB in the morning to catch the church goers. But holding rates around fifty all Sunday morning is very cool and who would want to go back to 80-SSB with those numbers.

The Antennas Station #2 operated with a pair of full size 75 and 40-Meters dipole antenna fed with separate coax cables. The close spacing created some tuning problems but they spent some extra time getting them close to their operating frequencies. This antenna set up proved to be much better than previous arrangements.

Dual Separate 40 & 75-Meter Dipoles
They worked great - There's nothing like real antennas

Jay Ives - KI4TXP
Saturday Night Was A Nice Night