AERO AMATEUR RADIO CLUB    

Bob WA3SWA and Al K3ROJ traveled to West Virginia to work the ARRL VHF Contest in September, 2006 since we have the advantage of being at 2300 feet elevation. We didn't experience an aurora or six metre opening such as we had last year but there were many stations on mostly from the northeast. We worked many stations on the 220 band since Ron W3JEH let the club borrow his 150 watt amplifier which was driven by an Elecraft XV222 transverter. Stations were heard from Indiana, Canada, Ohio, North and South Carolina giving us some much needed grid sections. Many Rovers were worked this year giving us some new grids each time they moved to another area. Bob is very ingenious creating new ways to save time and his voice so he made a "CQ contest" voice WAV file on his laptop which was then looped to repeat every few seconds which then keyed the IC910H using VOX control with the microphone near the computer speaker. When a calling station was heard, it only required hitting the escape key and picking up the microphone. The IC756PRO has voice keying built in which came in handy during some slack periods on six metres and 220 MHz. Our total score looked very promising (almost 10,000 points) but were beat by another club in the WV  area.  The 1296 band wasn't used this year since we wanted to remain in the Limited Operator Multi band class using 4 bands.