DN75ax - Tongue River Road, Montana

DN75ax, aka "The Big Open"

Looking for W8BYA, I worked Gedas in about 3 minutes, nice 1100 miles QSO.

Up and out early for the 30 mile drive south into DN75, I was QRV by 1155z and K7MAC was waiting. DN65xx was just down the road too, but when I looked to see if I could do a double gird thing I had a road-cut blocking my horizon.

The 2M amp continues to be a pain. At one point I whacked it a good one and it started working again so I could complete with NQ7R and WA7HQD. There must be a cold solder join in there somewhere - I'll go looking later today. At least I've isolated the problem now.

Great heads-up on everybody's part when I lost the Internet. It was a super marginal signal and once the day started heating up I lost the path to the cell tower - God only knows where that was. I had just put the list out on PJ so I worked my way through it as best I could, and then called CQ in quadrants.

2M stations worked on meteor scatter: K7MAC, W8BYA, ND0B, KC6ZWT, AA7A, W9RM, KR7O, NQ7R, and WA7HQD. Nine stations for a morning's outing is fine with me.

Post Script - I pulled the bottom cover off the 2M amp this afternoon and the solder joint at the center pin of the output connector sure looked suspect. I re-flowed that, so we'll see if that was the problem.  It does put out an even 200 watts into a dummy load with no oscillation.