I’m still honing my skills in this contest. It’s a different strategy when operating as an HQ station and of course, it’s the same for everyone, in that you only get one chance to catch a grey line opening. I hope that I managed to be in the right place at the right time this year. I did QSY to other bands when asked, so please remember to ask an HQ to move if you need them to. Unfortunately, I had no means of seeing what bands I had worked individual stations so I didn’t know where to move people. I’ll need to somehow figure out something for another time…..

I have compared my QSO and bonus points tally with last year and I can see that I worked just 10 more stations  overall and I ended up with a total of 603 QSOs but approx 10% fewer contacts on 80 and 40.  I also had fewer bonus points overall too.

As you may know, I tend to operate from a local University siite on the outskirts of Brighton. This year I used the same QTH but I made some changes to the 80m aerials that I had available. This year for this contest I put up a pair of phased verticals which I think helped a bit but I’m not sure that they’re working as well as they could. The other aerials were a doublet for 80m at 70ft and a dipole at 60ft for 40m and a triband Yagi at 60ft for the HF bands. Rig was an Elecraft K3 and an Alpha 89 amp.

I think we need to publicise the fact that we have several HQ stations representing a similar area ( such as the regional variations of G6XX.  For the 2nd year running I had a question about it from Brian 9J2BO. I suspect the more casual operators are also a little confused).

Thanks to all for the QSOs in this rather special contest. See you all next year.

73 Graham G4FNL