Hello all

I’ve operated as GB5CC on a number of occasions, including as GB75CC with Vic G4BYG.  Last year I used GM3DR, but quite a number of stations did not realise that GM3DR was a Bonus HQ station, so they missed out. Some UK stations even refused to work GM3DR when I called them    This year I was pleased to operate as GM6XX – it was surprising how often the ‘XX’ was picked up by the DX station when I was calling them in a pile-up of UK stations.

I found conditions fairly good for the first few hours – there is friendly rivalry between the HQ stations – at one point I was about 30 QSOs ahead of Don, but that did not last and GM6XX ended up well behind GB5CC on final QSOs.  15m was a bit disappointing here, but I worked everyone that asked me to move to 10m which was good. I did some CQing on 10m at times, but nowadays unless a skimmer finds you, no human does.

I always work any station that calls – I’ve found in the past that ‘QSO B4’ sometimes just makes the other station persist in calling. I failed to log a VE4 on my second radio PC, so had to call and work them again – luckily they did not argue!

BAND   QSO DUP DXC  HQ  POINTS BONUS   AVG
——————————————————
80      141      1       18      6     175     580      5.35
40      209      3       30      9     365   1120      7.11
20      210      4       37      7     575   1460      9.69
15       46       0       13      4      85      340      9.24
10         8       0        0       1       5         20      3.13
——————————————————
TOTAL   614   8       98     27    1205  3520     7.70
====================================
TOTAL SCORE : 4 725 (????)

I am a fan of WinTest, but I was not impressed with it for BERU – it did not identify which RBN spots were in the log or not , for example, so I had to keep checking callsigns.  I worked about 190 DX stations out of the 622 QSOs – the rest were UK stations.  WinTest does not have a clue about how to score this contest…..

Beaming on the long path to VK and ZL on Sunday morning I could hear my own signal when I went back to receive, but that may have been some multipath effect, rather than ‘all the way around’, however it did give me some hope for better HF propagation in the coming years.

Thanks to everyone who worked GM6XX.

73    Chris   GM3WOJ