Station assets include an Elecraft K3 running up to 100w, a Cushcraft A3 tribander fixed NW (USA/JA), a Cushcraft A4 fixed NE (EU), and a 160M OCF wire antenna. All antennas are mounted on a Rohn 45G 80 foot tower. A rotatable mulit-band antenna is planned in coming months. There is fiberoptic internet service to the site. All HH2AA contacts are uploaded to LOTW almost immediately and QSL cards can requested from NR6M. The grid square is FK38uk.

Pictures and additional information about the station can be found at these URLs:

https://www.qrz.com/db/hh2aa and
http://www.remotehamradio.com/2017/04/hh2aa-is-back/ and
http://www.remotehamradio.com/2017/12/hh2aa/

I sincerely thank the owners of RHR for providing this unique opportunity to test drive HH2AA during the 2018 ARRL DX Phone contest. The original plan was to set the station up at the site of my own future 'remote' at KU2C/3 in Finland, PA. As you will read below adapting to rapidly changing circumstances can be an important part of this game we call contesting.

Timeline of Events Leading Up to Operating HH2AA:

Tuesday 2/21 Received the green light from RHR to use HH2AA during the ARRLDX Phone Contest.

Wednesday 2/22 Determined my 15 year old Dell laptop lacks the necessary horsepower to handle the task.

Saturday 2/24 KU2C comes up with a more powerful laptop and extra monitor (Thanks Pete!)

Tuesday 2/27 Lee, WW2DX at RHR and Pete, KU2C run proof of concept tests - everything works!

Thursday 3/1 Set station up at KU2C's QTH using my K3S. Test several microphones. Dial in the VOX settings. Integrate Win-Test. Everything is ready to go! My K3S and Win-Test control the K3 at HH2AA perfectly. Make 100 contacts to get the feel for remote operation. Leave KU2C that evening feeling totally upbeat.

Friday 3/2 10:30 a.m. Impact of a predicted major coastal storm begins to be felt by mid-morning. Snow and high winds start to make travel by automobile difficult.

3/2 11:59 a.m. KU2C sends a text to tell me he's lost commercial power due to downed trees. Estimated time to repair unknown (repairs were not made until late Sunday afternoon). Concurrently, while on the FRC Slack Chat Channel, developed a Plan B - I'll travel the 37 miles to KU2C, pick up station, and relocate to K3WW who has emergency power and internet.

3/2 2:30 p.m. Set off on the trek to KU2C/3 allowing several extra hours for possible travel difficulties. My projected ETA is 5 p.m.

3/2 5:35 p.m. Lee at RHR calls to tell me connectivity to HH2AA has been lost. It is a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) problem on Haiti. Tech will visit site in the morning. We discuss possible operation using another RHR site within FRC club territory until fate of HH2AA is known.

3/2 6:30 p.m. Have now been on the road for four hours and advanced just 25 miles. Have seen over a dozen cars and school buses off the road, many snapped utility poles, downed power lines, uprooted trees, experienced blizzard whiteout conditions, and most importantly have yet to find a plowed or treated road surface. Traffic is at a total standstill in the area of Perkesie, PA. Routes 313 and 113 are parking lots.

3/2 6:40 to 7:10 p.m. Take refuge in a restaurant and have dinner. Nothing is going well as you can tell.

3/2 7:15 p.m. Back on the road. Finally find a way to get beyond a major hill that has prevented me from reaching KU2C, only to be detoured again twice by downed trees and wires.

3/2 9:30 p.m. After seven hours finally reach KU2C in Finland, PA. We load the station into my car and I set off for K3WW. Immediately encounter another blocked road - tree down. Will this horror show ever end?

3/2 10:25 p.m. Reach K3WW. Driveway is blocked by nearly three feet of piled up snow. Call RHR. All NY stations are now off the network due to storm related problems (no power, no internet, etc.) Decide to drive home to NJ. You can't fight mother nature.

3/2 11:55 p.m. Arrive home after over 9+ hours of travel. Road conditions magically improved as I crossed the bridge between PA into NJ. Contemplate what to do in the morning.

Saturday 3/3 9:00 a.m. Talk to Lee at RHR. Technician has been dispatched by ISP to diagnose problem. ETA on-site is unknown. No guarantee internet service will be restored. Consider going to the W2CG M2. Set the station up (laptop and K3) on the dining room table "just in case" connectivity is restored.

3/3 2:00 p.m. Lee calls from RHR. HH2AA is back up on the network. EUREKA! We run through the setup procedure and quickly discover the ISP technician had mistakenly reset a critical on-site RHR router that was configured to provide external rig control and logging program support. No way to resolve this problem until Monday.

3/3 2:20 p.m. The only option left - use the basic RHR functionality regularly available on their station control page which provides antenna selection, band and mode selection, PTT, basic frequency control and tuning, output power monitor, a beta version voice keyer, and a basic logging program.

3/3 2:22 p.m. I weight my options and immediately decide I'll go forward with the operation. Being DX is far more fun than being a W2 during this event.

3/3 2:29 p.m. Began operating on 21.420. Called CQ just once. Instant pileup - the power of being a needed multiplier is immediately demonstrated.

The Operating Experience

Starting a contest nearly 20 hours late dictates some mental adjustment and recalculation of goals. I'd missed the entire first night (80 and 40 meter prime time) and most of the best running hours on 15M the first day. Came to the conclusion the best score I could hope for would be achieved by simply running on the band with the best rate and not worrying at all about multipliers (hoping they would find me). Besides, without contest logging software I was operating "blind" with no idea of what multipliers were needed on a band or how many contacts I might have on any band at any point in time. No contest software also meant no access to Super Check Partial to confirm call signs. At least I wouldn't be manual logging. :-)

It took a few hours to get comfortable operating without what over the years have become basic tools. I was probably bothered most by not having VOX. Have never been a foot switch guy and having to manually press the CTRL button (PTT) on thekeyboard for every transmission took some adjustment. The other thing I probably missed most was not being able to move between log entry fields by pressing the space bar key ... something I've done for over forty years using CT, NA, Win-Test and other loggers. It took several hours to automatically press the 'Tab' key after entering a call ... but it took concentration! Later on into the contest having to enter report data for EVERY contact (no report pre-fills after working a station on another band) became rather tedious.

Being the only station active from Haiti certainly attracted a crowd. It's probably been a decade or more since I've had Aruba all to myself in a major contest. I knew what to expect and was prepared for the massive initial response. This was one of the reasons I decided to proceed with the operation even with a somewhat limited tool set... I'm a rate junkie at heart and the prospect of big pileups was terribly appealing!

Needless to say I was not disappointed. The first five hours on 20M Saturday afternoon were consistent 150 hours ... the adrenaline rush was spectacular. Then as I transitioned to 40M and then 80M the pileups continued to be impressive considering I'm running just 100 watts to a 160M OCF wire through an auto tuner. It was heaven!

The only serious shortcoming of the station is the noise from the solar inverter system which covers 160 meters with S9 garbage. The RHR guys think they have a fix but it will have to wait until their next visit. On CW this racket is less disruptive when using narrow filtering. Only K3WW made it through on Top Band in a 'move' QSO from 80M. I tuned a few times, thought I heard K3LR and W3LPL CQing, but never well enough to attempt a QSO.

The Sunday morning sunrise run on 80 and then 40 was better than I had expected but then the morning doldrums set in. Both 20 and 15 opened to EU from the US which forced those of us to the south to take a back seat. The rate dropped like a rock - 20 an hour was the norm until about 1800 when the floodgates opened on 15M, yielding an exciting 177 hour - my best of the contest.

I set up a cluster window on a 2nd laptop during the slow period Sunday morning and watched ten meter call outs all day. Never saw a single spot for the HI8 or KP4 guys so had low expectations for an opening but kept trying some CQs from time to time each hour. There simply was never propagation from HH to the US - disappointing to say the least.

So what about the internet latency issue? To tell you the truth it was rarely noticeable. At times the internet would burp or my laptop would become over burdened and slow down, but this never stopped me from making contacts. Sometimes I'd simply hit a key that I shouldn't have on the keyboard and I'd end up disconnected and would need to restart. But in general, I found remote operation very easy and not all that different than the real thing. Using PTT, I had to be somewhat careful not to let up on the CTRL button too soon, otherwise the final "A" in HH2AA would get cut off (suspect if I had VOX working correctly this would have been a non-issue). No one complained that my audio was unintelligible at any point. And probably most important of all I felt LOUD most of the time. The HH2AA location is a winner.

Post Contest

When the bell rang at 2359 UTC I had absolutely no idea how I'd done in my 23 hours of on time. The RHR logger doesn't have a contact counter so the total number of QSOs logged was unknown. Monday morning Lee at RHR sent me a file of ADIF contact records. It was apparent there were almost 2,500 contacts but work was needed to create a log in valid Cabrillo format. During the contest I'd mistakenly entered report data in the wrong log entry field for about 400 contacts near the start, and without an edit check, throughout the weekend at least 50 section abbreviations were entered wrong but still accepted. These are minor things really, but time consuming to fix manually. I used a freeware converter to migrate from ADIF to Cabrillo format records. Fellow FRCer KE2D helped me correct some record format errors. Finally by late Monday evening, (early Tuesday morning), I had a log file I could load on Win-Test and obtain statistics. As expected 20M was my big band but I was impressed by the 40 meter multiplier total given the limited time spent there. I can't help but wonder what the score could have been if the original setup that had worked so well Thursday afternoon were available all weekend.

Bottom line, to me the HH2AA remote operation was an unqualified success despite the 19 hour delayed start and not having basic accessories. I'd love to do it again. Thanks RHR for this opportunity and for your first class support every step of the way!

73,

John, W2GD aka P40W/P44W

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