KL7RA

We always enjoyed talking to Rich Strand, KL7RA, at Dayton, and were saddened to hear of his passing in November, 2015. However, thanks to the efforts of the North Pole Contest Group, his legacy continues.

The station, on a hill top in Nikiski, north of Kenai, has beautiful views.

Steve Bloom, KL7SB, purchased the QTH,

and with Wigi Tozzi, KL0R, as trustee,

KL7RA lives on as a club station.

CQ WW SSB 2018 was the first operation as a M/M. Steve built an addition to Rich's original house, adding more dormitory space

and producing a spacious, comfortable ham shack. The original section was set up as the workshop and 20m and 40m positions. The new addition was set up for 15m, 80m, and an SO2R position for 10m and 160m, as well as the snack refrigerators, coffee maker, and bathroom. New, large monitors were added, and the station was rewired as M/M.

The bandpass filters and switching network are housed in the "copper room", which used to be the original shack bathroom.

Two sheds hold reels of cable, tower belts, parts, and tools.

Quite a bit of work needed to be done to get ready for the contest.

We replaced three bad coax connectors for the fixed JA 20m antenna.

We built lock-out boxes and receiver-overload protection boxes:

We added more radials to the 160m vertical:

Some sidemounted antennas had turned in the wind. Paul straightend out the lower 10m antenna before the contest.

The antennas (as of October, 2018) consist of:

160m: Full-sized vertical built of Rohn 25 with a whisker on top and ground radials. Used for transmit only.

80m: Half-wave wire 4-square, 130' tall

40m: (North tower) 4 element M2 at 95', half-wave wire 4-square (currently not in use), (South tower) 2 stacked 2-element shorty-fortys at 55' and 110'. The two towers are three wavelengths apart N-S and can be tuned to be driven in phase 20m: North

20: 5 over 5 M2 at 55' and 110', East 20: 5 over 5 M2 at 45' and 90', fixed 5-element homebrew on JA at 45'

15m: 5 over 5 Cushcraft at 35' and 70', 4 over 4 over 4 Cushcraft at 33', 66', and 99'.

10m: 5 over 5 over 5 Cushcraft at 30', 60', and 120'

Beverages: N, NE. E. and W 660'. No need for receiving antennas for JA, KH6, or ZL. Used on 160m and can be used on 80m.

For CQ WW SSB 2018, the operators were:

AL2F, Kris Kerce

KL7SB, Steve Bloom

KQ1F, Charlotte Richardson

K1XM, Paul Young

KA1NCN, Dave Case

KL0R, Wigi Tozzi

KL2HD, Jeff Williams

After contest, the four blown amplifiers needed to be repaired

and one lower 20m antenna needed to be straightened out.

We returned in 2019 for the CQ WW SSB contest.

This time not all that much antenna or tower work needed to be done. Steve and Wigi wanted to swap out several working-but-old Tailtwister antenna rotors for Yaesu rotors, which necessitated rewiring the Green Heron rotor control boxes. Tree, N6TR, did the tower work, and he and Paul rewired the controllers.

There were nine operators for the contest: KQ1F (Charlotte Richardson), KA1NCN (Dave Case), K1XM (Paul Young), KL7SB (Steve Bloom), KL0R (Wigi Tozzi), N6TR ("Tree" Tyree), KL7TC (Bill Hunstein), KT0W (Nick Hauser), and N5ZO (Marko Myllymaki). Before the contest, Wigi had us test for inter-station interference and any other issues we might have. We were well-staffed and well-prepared.

However, a coronal hole caused truly awful conditions for anyone operating from a high-latitude location like ours. The resulting aurora, when we had clear skies, was a beutiful bright green arc across the entire northern horizon, so bright that it was still visible well into twilight. At least Paul was finalluy able to photograph an aurora, though that was small consolation at the time.

We had six operators in the station at all times and were calling CQ on several bands continuously, but there were many hours when none of us worked anything. Stations at lower latitudes had better conditions, but of course missed a lot of high-latitude multipliers like us.

Our final score was only 1/8 of what we achieved in 2018, a real slog.

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Last modified 7 November 2019