I recently traveled to Amarillo to visit my daughter and her husband. While there I ventured around the Texas Panhandle to find a good rover route for the June VHF contest.
My thought was that I could activate fairly easily eight grids during the contest from two grid corners — one south of Amarillo and one north of Amarillo. The terrain is quite suitable with flatlands extending as far as the eye can see. See the photo above from DM96.
The downside is that there will not be much local VHF-UHF activity. However, for the June contest I’m hoping for lots of sporadic E along with meteor scatter on 6 meters. That, and putting some rare grids on the air should motivate a few people to work hard to put me in their logs.
Here’s the routes with maps shown below:
Saturday, June 8
- DM93ax — 1 PM contest start
- DM83xx — 3 PM
- DM84xq — 5 PM
- DM94ab — 7 PM
Sunday, June 9
- DM85xv — 8 AM
- DM95aw — 11 AM
- DM86xc — 1 PM
- DM96ac — 4 PM
I’ll be operating on 6m, 2m, and 70cm in the Limited Rover category. I have recently ordered a TE Systems 6m Amplifier that should get me to 170 watts and help a bit with meteor scatter. I’m also considering a upgrade from the 6m moxon, but not quite sure about that.
Hope to work you during the contest and add multipliers to your log.
It looks like you have a great plan, Jim. I know those spots very well! Great horizons.
73
Clayton
W5PFG
Thanks, Clayton. It would be nice to activate them on satellites as well. But the contest usually takes all my attention. 73, Jim, K5ND
[…] may have caught my previous blog post on my planned June Rover Route in the Texas Panhandle. It actually happened this past weekend, by and large on the schedule that […]