Team W6YX has a been chugging along, participating in the annual ARRL Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) contest. The contest consists of three weekends. The first weekend is for frequencies above 2GHz, usually in September. In October and November are two contest weekends for amateur radio frequencies bands below 2GHz. The goal is to contact as many stations as you can using the surface of the moon as a passive reflector. Voice, CW, and digital communication modes are
used. We built from scratch, modified existing designs, modified existing hardware, modified existing code or wrote code from scratch to build our 5 band EME station. W6YX regularly contacts stations around the world via a lunar path using 10.368GHz, 2.304GHz, 1.296GHz, 432MHz and 144MHz.
Our team has been busy in recent years with non amateur radio aspects of our lives. This has prevented us from putting on a 5 band contest effort. Due to time constraints we didn’t give a 2018 update, so it’s fitting we start there. Our unexpected issues from 2017 continued. As summer of 2018 was ending we decided to optimize our 10GHz station. Usually we pick a project to concentrate our efforts on before the EME contest. Knowing our beam pattern will give valuable information in determining why our dish is performing notably worse than what it’s theoretically capable of. We setup a signal generator feeding a dish 5km away.
We scanned the vicinity of this signal source using our 4.6m dish in 0.1º increments, measuring its amplitude using Linrad’s excellent signal level measurement functionality. After several hours spent painstakingly manually scanning, we had a spreadsheet full of data points used to produce a plot of our dish’s beam pattern.
The pattern alone did not explain the lack of expected performance. With no single or easy point of optimization we could complete before the contest, we decided to enter our station into the contest as-is.
While testing our 10GHz station, we noticed our echos off of the moon were greatly attenuated. 
Further inspection showed a critter had crawled and nested in our feed horn. Unfortunately it did not survive the dielectric heating during the transmission periods of our TWT amplifier. The remains were too charred to identify the species of the critter. The melted Kapton wave guide seal (over 400ºC/750ºF) gave indication of the temperatures involved. 
Fortunately this issue was easy to repair.
Unfortunately right before the start of the contest, our dish elevation system exhibited failure resulting in very high elevation motor current draw. The current draw caused the failure of a 2ohm 100W current limiting resistor in series with the motor. We found a temporary solution by placing the manual mechanical brake part way between the on and off position. This allowed the failed braking system just enough pressure to keep the dish from falling in elevation, but not too much brake pressure that the motor couldn’t over power. We couldn’t simply bypass the current limiting resistor to the motor with out spending time recalibrating the controller used to drive the motor. To replace the blown 2ohm 100W resistor, we found some stranded wire cut to a length that resulted in 2ohms. Unfortunately the wire jacket was not able to withstand the 260ºC temperatures the motor drew, even with the brake partially released. 
After charring this makeshift wire resistor, we ended up putting together a combination of power resistors in series and parallel to produce 2ohms. However, this also proved ineffective, as the resistors quickly began to overheat. An elegant solution was found. We placed the resistors in a bucket of water. If the water didn’t boil, we knew the resistors were safe, under 100ºC. 
After these hurdles and missing the first night of the contest, we were able to make it back on the moon the second night and scored a respectable 2nd place in the multi-operator, all mode, 10GHz category. Our team has worked extremely hard over the years building our station in capability, bands, reliability and usability. Team W6YX’s ARRL EME contest performance over the past 7 years reflects this.
2012- 4th place in the multi-operator, all mode, all band category
2013- 5th place in the multi-operator, all mode, all band category
2014- 2nd place in the multi-operator, all mode, all band category
2015- 1st place in the multi-operator, all mode, all band category. Would have placed top three in each of our 5 bands if our efforts were divided.
2016- 1st place in the multi-operator, all mode, 1.2GHz category
2017- 1st place in the single-operator, CW mode, 1.2GHz category
2017- 2nd place in the multi-operator, all mode, 10GHz category (using the call N9JIM)
2018- 2nd place in the multi-operator, all mode, 10GHz category (using the call N9JIM)
2019- Projected based on electronic logs received: 1st place in the multi-operator, all mode, 1.2GHz category (using the call K6MG), and 2nd place in the multi-operator, all mode, 144MHz category
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In 2019 team W6YX had another successful ARRL EME contest. We put in a more limited effort this year, operating 1296 and 144 MHz. The contest was not with out its share of unexpected surprises. We had planned to also operate our 10GHz station, but a last minute elevation position readout issue prevented us from getting our 10GHz signal on the moon for the first time in 5 years. Our elevation syncro position to digital converter box developed a strange intermittent offset. 
We have since replaced it with a working unit, but requiring at least 0.1º position readout to track the moon, it was not feasible to devise an alternative solution overnight to save our 10GHz contest entry. Critters continued to chew through our coax and cables over the prior year, so we spent contest time fixing the damage and adding shielding to prevent further gnawing. 
Given how busy our team was with non ham activities, we decided 2019 would also be a limited contest effort for us. When we put in a limited effort, we typically use calls signs of various team members, and save the W6YX call sign for our more competitive contest entries. We chose to enter our 7.9m diameter dish on 1296 MHz, and our four 10m long boom yagi, cross polarity 144 MHz antenna array individually, each band operating casually using different call signs. 
Our 1296MHz station was performing intermittently up to the contest. The azimuth readout would intermittently shift by 90º, causing tracking issues. Our amplifier’s power supply would intermittently shut off, interrupting contacts. Our 144MHz station was performing great however. No issues observed while testing before the contest. Unexpectedly, our 1296MHz station cleaned up its act and performed great over the two contest weekends. We operated casually, abandoning the station shortly after the moon rose for our EME friends over the Pacific. Given our evening moon rise, we didn’t have the energy to operate through the night and morning. Relative to a station near the Eastern USA shore, we have about 3 hours less moon time with Europe, the hub of EME activity, per lunar pass. This 18 hour deficit across all three contest weekends is a challenging deficit to overcome. The level of activity between Europe and the Pacific is significant. To put it in perspective, typically we we contact two or three times more stations from Germany alone than all of our friends over the Pacific combined.
The first weekend of the under 2GHz portion of the contest resulted in unexpected failure of our 144 MHz station. Not long after our moon rise we completely lost our vertical polarity transmit and receive capability. Several minutes later we also lost our horizontal polarity. This was unfortunate, as the hours after moon rise on the first weekend is the most active and fruitful for making contacts at a fast rate. Inspection showed we had fried our high powered transmit/receive RF relays. 
The temperature inside the relay got hot enough to crack its internal ceramic contact guides. The internal relay contact use to be shiny gold and symmetric in shape. 
It was not feasible to foresee the cause of the failure. The azimuth motor for our 144MHz EME array uses a DC motor, whose direction is changed via an H bridge composed of industrial mechanical relays.
The coil of these relays use the same 28VDC supply that powers the coils of our transmit/receive RF relays. One industrial relay started to fail by sticking in the on position. This caused our array to drift away out of control. Natural human instinct is to pull the array’s direction control joystick in the opposite direction that the array was stuck running. Unfortunately, due to the stuck relay in the H bridge, the direction reversing caused a short in the H bridge, which caused a short of the 28VDC power supply, which caused the high powered transmit/receive RF relay coils to disengage while 1500W of RF was flowing through its contacts. The contacts were hot switched off. As the pictures above show, the damage to the contacts was severe, evaporating much of the metal. The sticking H bridge relay problem occurred during the 2018 contest, and was forgotten about. We suspect our RF relays were hot switched and damaged in 2018, but did not completely fail until the 2019 contest. Such exotic failure modes can not be anticipated. It is not feasible to exhaust so much of our resources building a station resilient to such obscure failures. We replaced the RF relays the following day and were back on the moon the second day. Drenching the sticky H bridge relay with penetrating lubricant and manually massaging its actuator prevented it from sticking for the rest of the contest. 
Both bands of our station performed great the second weekend. On 1296 MHz we even called CQ via SSB and had a nice chat with VE6BGT (55/57). On 144 MHz we never recovered from losing invaluable contest time while having mutual moon time with Europe, but scored well none the less. Based on the 194 electronic logs the ARRL received as of December 23rd, 2019, we are projected to rank 1st place in the multi-operator, all mode 1296MHz category, and 2nd place in the competitive multi-operator, all mode, 144MHz category. Pleasing results given our team’s limited effort and misadventures. 