from inside the transmitter building using the same hardline which feeds the tower when the commercial station is transmitting. An SO-239 was installed at an otherwise empty auxiliary position of the antenna switch inside the main building, and this was fed with 9913 from the output of the amplifier. The broadcast station comes back on at 6 AM, so our network was pulled around 5:40 and the antenna feed switched back to "main." Although it took a couple of hours to tune the network, the un-install took about 5 minutes. Now that the outbound system has been field tested, future ops will have relatively quick install-uninstall times. The station itself consisted of an IC-765 driving a Kenwood amplifier, with a ThinkPad running Writelog 10.20 handling logging chores.
    We received very excellent signal reports from Australia, Mexico, Alberta, and north and south into Seattle and AZ, west to Colorado, and Texas. It was clear, though, that we need to work on the inbound signals. We had a noise floor of about 10 over, and we often heard stations calling us which we couldn't pick out of the noise. The expectation is that when fully developed, the site will have 3 or 4 rx antennas, including beverages running N-S and SE-NW, a square-loop, and a shielded loop. These will be switched manually for best rx reception. We also anticipate inserting a 20 dB pre-amp in-line to augment the 10 dB preamp already on-board the 765.
    We plan to continue to develop this site for top band work - the next session is expected to be dur

ing November Phone Sweepstakes, and the goal is to put in a class winning entry for the ARRL 160 test in December, and the CQ WW 160 tests in January and February. Contact N7RX if you'd like to be involved with the W7LT TBCC.
Neal Sacon N7RX

    Ever wondered what it would be like to run a kilowatt into a 5/8 wave vertical with 120 ¼ wave ground spokes on 160 meters? The W7LT Top Band Contest Committee found out during a CQ WW test run at Mt. Scott on October 28. K7RUN, W7PR, KD7PXF, KD7INU & N7RX pulled an all-nighter and sent up a single-band phone station using one of the AM broadcast towers, courtesy K7RUN. The usual occupant goes off-line at 10 PM on weekends, and this provided us with a fairly unique opportunity. How'd it work out? GREAT! We had a very loud signal, and the highlight of the evening was a QSO with VK6HD in Albany, Australia.
    The starting point of the test was K7RUN's construction of a matching network. Using rather hefty coils and capacitors, John installed the network in the "doghouse" at the base of the tower and was able to get an SWR at the transmitter of 1.2:1 at 1825 KHz. The bandwidth was quite good - the 2:1 bandwidth was about 40 Kc, from 1805 to 1845 KHz. The network was inserted in place of the commercial network, and the tower was fed