For some months I’ve been successfully using DXlog in contests and had everything loaded tested and ready to go ahead of the contest. I soon realised I had two problems. Firstly the bandmap was not displaying any of the spots from the VE7CC cluster that had been picked up by skimmers, only manually entered spots.  Easy I thought, I need to send a SET/SKIMMER to the node, but that didn’t do the trick and I verified the spots were being sent to me by loading N1MM and watching them come in. The second problem was that even some (but not all) of the manually entered spots were not showing as workable stations in the bandmap. For 4 hours whilst still trying to make QSOs I tried to fix the problems . even loading new databases, but by 1400 I was so frustrated I decided the best thing to do was dump an ADIF file of all QSOs so far from DXLog and import it into N1MM. Even that required massaging of the ADIF as the contest ID fields were different and also the HQ status of any QSOs so far was lost. But at 1427 the contest really started for me. Just a shame I had lost so much time, especially some prime time on 15m. Just to be clear I’m not knocking DXlog, I imagine the problems were with the operator – I’d be interested to swap notes with anybody who successfully used DXLog in this contest.

40m proved to be the most productive band for me with a good mix of VK/ZL/VE/Caribbean and a few Africans. I thought 80m was below par with only a couple of VKs worked on Saturday evening and a few ZLs on Sunday morning – the VE count on 80m was lower than usual, but that may have been because of my 3 hour sleep after 0130. The 20m & 15m count were lower than expected, but primarily due to time lost to IT problems. Very rare, but no VK or ZL on 15m. All of my 10m QSOs were with UK stations moved there from other bands.

Being an HQ station certainly adds to the fun of this contest – it is hard at times , especially from a noisy urban QTH, digging calls out of the noise, but rewarding when you finally get it. I had expected that I should be able to make 500 QSOs, but only managed 402. I only had 2 stations tell me I couldn’t call other UK stations, but they gave me reports when I explained I was an HQ station. Two stations initially refused to give me a report thinking I was a dupe but advising them of NIL did the trick.

There is something very special about BERU, and even with the IT problems it was great fun, thank you all for the QSOs.

Equipment: FTdx101D + ACOM 1k linear run at 400w. Dipoles at 12m for 40, 20, 15, 10m and 40m inverted L at 12m for 80m.

73 Mike /G3WPH/G3DR.