Here I am trying not to freeze by sitting on a heating pad while I strain to hear through the static crashes.
So how did I do you ask? Well it's a long story. 160 meters is only open at night, during the day only local contacts (50 miles or so) are possible. The contest started at 4pm Friday and ended at 4pm Sunday. At four on Friday I had a balloon up and was ready to go. As the contest started the QSO rates were slow. (For those non-amateur radio operators, a QSO is a contact or conversation) As the sun set, however, things started to pick up. By 8pm I had been called by ZF2NT in the Cayman Islands! This is the farthest I had ever reached on 160 meters. By 9pm I had reached a rate of 35 QSOs per hour and things were really working great. I was receiving tremendous signal reports from all over the Western and Central US. Numerous operators told me I was the loudest signal on the band and I received repeated 30 and 40 over 9 signal reports.
At 3am, unknown to me, the thing I had feared most had happened. The weather forecasters were wrong and the winds had been slowly building. Suddenly my SWR rose dramatically and I knew something was wrong. I stopped transmitting and went outside only to find that my balloon was gone. The winds had ripped it off the shampoo bottle it was attached to with multiple rubber bands.
I went inside and woke my dad. (Wouldn't you like to have a dad you could wake up at 3am to fix your antennas?) I explained what had happened and that the wire had made it back to the ground without tangling in the radial wires. Not knowing just how wrong the weather forecasters were to be that weekend, I decided to float another balloon assuming the winds would die down. We scrambled to rig another balloon and began inflating. It takes about 20-25 minutes to fully inflate the balloon (7ft tall x 6ft wide). We tied the balloon to the wire and began releasing it. The winds had gotten slightly stronger and by the time I had let out all the support line the antenna was nearly horizontal as the wind tried to blow the balloon to the ground. This balloon would last less than 30 minutes before breaking loose and breaking the antenna in the process. By now I've wasted most of the remaining prime operating time and the sun is coming up. Along with the sun's return the band quickly went dead so I went to sleep.
Saturday evening the winds were still too strong for a balloon and working just the low dipole was getting me nowhere. Taking the radial plate down to fix the antenna seemed too time consuming to be practical. In the short time I had worked the night before I had made 219 QSOs. After calling for two hours straight, I had only made 17 more on the dipole so I decide to stop and attempt to fix the vertical.
It is now 9pm Saturday evening and the winds have slowed some. I cut half the radial support ropes and dropped the antenna to the ground. Using a propane torch I soldered a new wire onto the plate and pulled it back up in the air. I inflated another balloon, but ran out of helium before it was fully inflated. Without enough lift the balloon was doing an inadequate job of compensating for the winds. The most recent forecast said the winds would continue to die down. I figured once they got low enough I could begin working again. Unfortunately, as the winds died down and the balloon started to go up to a more vertical position, the radiating wire got tangled on the end of the dipole. Now I was in big trouble. It is 3:30am and the sun will be up soon. I can't operate on the vertical because it is shorted to the dipole and I can't operate on the dipole for the same reason. Unable to continue I went to bed.
At 9am I got up to discover that by some miracle the wire had untangled itself and the balloon was flying high in light winds. I got on knowing the band would be dead at this time of the day and called for two hours. I made only one contact with a Ham in Polluck Pines.
All and all while everything was working, I had a blast. I will experiment with large kites as a backup for next year and maybe I'll find even more property to use if I'm lucky. I'd like to put up beverage receive antennas next year (need 60 acres+).
Despite these setbacks if I conservatively project my rates (for the hours everything was working) forward, I would have had a score capable of winning the Zone 3 plaque (Western US). The final tally was 237 QSOs, working 29 States, 5 Canadian provinces, and two countries (Mexico and the Cayman Islands) for a total score of 19,116.
Special thanks to my Dad WD6BOX for graciously letting me destroy his backyard and disturb his sleep, and also to Amanda and Bailey (my girlfriend's daughters) who helped me build the monstrous antenna. Without their help none of this would have been possible.
Until next year...