Hello Bob,

I want to let you know how much I enjoyed the Commonwealth Contest again this year.  Conditions didn’t seem to be very good but in spite of that I got more contacts (70) than I have been able to make previously.  Making contacts from here in the Yukon can be difficult – partly due to equipment and antenna (and operator too, I’m sure) but it’s also a long way from most of the centres of activity and I think that people with beam antennas don’t aim this way too often.

Bob – here is my report on the 2020 BERU, thanks.

So glad I made the effort to get back in the BERU – Just managed to get my 80m shallow vee up to about 45 ft on Friday night using some bendy 3″ plastic pipes which fell over a couple of times during erection !! It was meant to be a temporary antenna but after all the effort I think it will continue to be an eyesore for a while. The 4el KLM is only about 40′ fixed and pointing 60 deg. but did not do too badly in the end. Had an amp failure on the old SB201 when the relay wire to the swr bridge seemed to have melted and made me deaf !! So after a quick pull down and an equally quick solder job – got it going again !! Desperately tried to snag ZD7BG on 15 but he was focused on EU, also heard my neighbour ZF2CA from the back of the beam but he could not hear me. Good to hear some still familiar calls like G4BUO he was loud !! The HQ stations all had big signals too – the lack of multipliers and VK/ZL’s let me down this year.

80 and 40 was very hashy throughout the entire contest – I got a very slow start as I was using and learning the new SD logging program for the first time after coming from the old pen and paper logging 23 years ago !!. It is great when you get going eventually !! Now if only I can get it to key from the keyboard – oh well, I have another year to figure it out.

Thoroughly enjoyed it although slightly handicapped by a quadruple bypass and arthritic fingers !!! Covid19 hit us here on the island earlier in the week so there were many family concerns, but the show must go on hi !! Hope to see you all next year……

This is what it looked like in the end, less anything that I got wrong of course…. SD check was a breeze !!

-    -        80m     40m    20m   15m   10m   Total
QSO's          70     120    139     4     0     333
Bonus          27      36     31     3     0      97
Points        890    1320   1315    80     0    3605

Nigel 6Y5HN.

I planned to do 24 hours Open assisted but it didnt turn out like that.
I have spent most of last year and early this year trying to upgrade the 80 and 40m antennas with some success.

80m After playing around with various vertical set ups I settled on a vertical full wave loop, which modelled out OK but wasn’t as quiet on receive as I thought. Much more work needed on this. Not much space for Beverages here , maybe a sneeky one round the local field margin etc.

40m I changed the 3 element vertical I used in 2019 to a simpler 2 element as I found that the extra complexity of the 3el wasn’t really giving me much advantage. In tests earlier in March I found that just being able to beam east-west was fine for most part but that my west noise floor is much higher than the east ( local house line and the surgery ) I built a noise cancelling circuit and it worked really well enabling me to null out a lot of noise. Just needs automating for 2021.

But being a compulsive fiddler and at the last minute, I couldn’t help putting up a north south 2 element and all that did was to mess up the east-west front to back! You would think I would have learnt something over the 20 odd years of BERU.

20, 15 and 10m I used the Optibeam and the separate 4 element on 10 ( not that that gave me much just 3 HQs )

Conditions
10m Dead, except for the 3 HQs no point in CQing. Pity as I had heard the TO7 in the week but couldn’t get more than a ? so thought that 3B8 would be a long shot.

15m Very spotty, short openings tricky to catch. V31GX went from a real S9 to S0 in a matter of a few minutes. VY2ZM was very loud but at the same time the other VEs were just whispers. Very similar to 2019.

20m Very active with propagation all over the place. Round the world echoes again on some of the big G signals!

40m I am pretty sure that 40 was open for DX for the whole 24 hours – hidden a bit behind EUs and I therefore think my work with the 40 antennas and noise cancelling has enable me to hear a lot better.

80m Work in progress. VKs and ZLs, those I heard I managed to work – just need to hear more of them! Everyone was crammed into a narrow slot it seemed to me so I got crunched a few times. Apologies to those in the queue when I sent the wrong serial to 6Y5HN and stumbled to correct it.

Operating.
I had a series of local problems on Saturday evening which rather changed things. I had lost so much time in the evening I decided to just do 12 hours. When I restarted at 6am on Sunday our telephone and broadband had failed. I created a hotspot with my mobile but WinTest would not transfer spots to the bandmap. (Much later on Sunday and after a lot of head scratching or was it head banging, I found that the internal routing codes between the WinTest Telnet and the main programme had mysteriously changed themselves.)

So back to good old tuning the band, and you know what, you find a lot of bonusses that way which don’t get spotted.

Prefix list. 3B8(2), 5B, 5Z,6Y(2), 8P,9G, 9J(2), 9H(3), 9V, V3, V5, VEs, VK,2,3,4,6, VO1,2, VY0,1,2,VP2V,VP5, VU, ZB2, ZD7, ZF, ZLs, ZS1.

Overall, still learning, more antenna work. Thanks to everyone for a great contest.

73 Bob G3PJT