Friday morning soon arrived and I took the train down to the station, unlucky for me there was signalling problems between Swindon and Bristol which messed things up a bit and I had to change twice around the edge of Bristol before catching a connection to Weston but arrived and met by Mark (M0DXR), Simon (M0CLW) and Simon (2E0CVN).

Once arriving at the shack there was some antenna work to be done like cranking up the MonstIR which was seriously hard work as the antenna weights a ton! after a while though we soon had it up. and finished putting up the Clark field mast up which Paul had already setup and got it up to 30m it looked huge! which was to support the 160m antenna once we built that.. once all the antennas were up it was dark and we retreated to the shack to get the computers setup.

Simon (M0CLW) on mults duty

The contest started soon after and I was on the mults station on 40m was easy to pick-up the multipliers then but as the hours progressed it soon started to get harder, we did have an issue in the very early hours when the 160m antenna wouldn’t tune! but that was soon fixed in daylight, but we got some good runs into NA on 40m and good conditions into the far east. Conditions Sunday towards the end of the contest were not so great.

Score breakdown

 BAND   QSO DUP  PFX  POINTS   AVG
-----------------------------------
  160   145   0   37     294  2.03
   80   743   8  317    1784  2.40
   40   868   8  317    2987  3.44
   20  1438   8  415    3218  2.24
   15   127   0   75     337  2.65
   10     0   0    0       0  0.00
-----------------------------------
TOTAL  3321  24 1161    8620  2.60
===================================
     TOTAL SCORE : 10 007 820

The beams

The station performed great and was a breeze to use the IC7800 & IC7700 and we put the built in voice keyers to good use, all the options seemed in similar places on both and the filtering was effective for contesting environment. The stacked SteppIRs were excellent making working into NA pretty easy! and having a beam on 40m was very cool.

Overall had a fantastic weekend, great company and decent pileups, I was however was completely shattered Monday morning while returning home!

Seemed to work a good section of Europe and into the USA, ending up with 102Qs on 20m.

Equipment: Yaesu FT-950, 80m Windom and MixW

Day 1:

We started the contest around 6am Saturday morning due to the lack of people being able to start at midnight but that didn’t stop us! I woke up at 7am and got myself ready to head for Dartford to help operate the contest. On arrival at lunch time we had around 240q but conditions didn’t seem that great and getting runs was difficult.

During the later part of the afternoon we hit trouble with the amplifier (AMPUK Explorer 1200) and this pushed us to barefoot with an FT1000MP Field (100watts) but we kept plodding on into the night getting the odd run and mostly doing a lot of S&P.

The night shifters where Bob VE3SRE, Robert G8ITB, Paul, M3JFM and myself we somehow managed to split it so everyone did there share of the operating, and while you wasn’t doing that you could catch up on sleep or just have a chat with one and other.

Even with 100w we where working into the states and Canada on 20/40/80 without too much difficulty and sometimes surprised people when we told them the situation.

Day 2

Sunday was going to prove interesting at 1am the clocks went forward one hour so as most people put it we lost 1hr of sleep! We kept at the low bands working the odd station on 160 but mostly sticking to 80 and 40m. At 9am most of the contesting team was back on site and got to experience the lack of runs and again kept to s&p on 20m and the picking up the odd mult on 15m.

By noon we removed the 160 and 80m dipoles to speed up taking down the station later on. Dave (G4BUO) arrived with a KW-1000 amp later on in the afternoon but I’m told by Simon (2E0CVN) it didn’t make much difference.

The end score was

Total: 1029 QSOs, Prefixes = 543, Total Score = 1,045,818

Equipment:

FT1000MP, AMPUK Explorer 1200, Yagi for 20-10m, Dipoles for 160, 80, 40m
Software Win-Test

More pictures at http://flickr.com/photos/m3php/sets/72157604324850942/�