9am Saturday morning, just a quick walk down to the antennas to see if all looks OK. That’s odd I could have sworn I parked the Yagi on NE for VK/ZL but its pointing SE, strange. Quick look at the indicator in the shack and yes it says NE! So what’s going on? I found I could turn the beam but the direction was somewhat random in fact when the contest finished the beam was 180 deg out. This made for a challenging contest, lots of rushing back and forth to check the actual yagi direction for the entire contest as the error kept changing.

Nonetheless I thought conditions were quite reasonable and managed to break a few pile ups when the required direction and the beams actual direction were roughly the same. And there were certainly plenty of VK/ZL stations to work but probably fewer VEs than normal.

10m Usual spotty conditions 5X,5Z,9J, ZS around 1030-1300 and then ZF in the afternoon. No VE heard.

15m Outstanding signals from ZL6HQ on 15m SP . Jackie sounded as loud as a local as did VK6T and a nice bonus was ZD7.

20m Plenty of activity but for me no VE7, mystifying.

40m My receiving is limited by noise especially to the NW. and the noise nulling set up is much less effective on 40 than I had hoped. I might change to a rotary dipole this summer as the verticals are picking up too much local noise

80m So transmit on 80m and bang the SWR hits 4:1 the amp says ‘no way jose’ and shuts down. Flash over in ATU. It goes without saying that this did not occur in testing. On 80m though I have at last made some progress on noise reduction. Better engineering for next year. I think I will try shunt feeding the tower next.

On 80 too I should have stayed up later on Saturday but staying awake when the bands go quiet is practically impossible for me these days.

DXLog worked fine and the new version of the software has cured the slow band change problem I experienced in February. I like the SO2V implementation especially.

Looking back at the whole contest I was a bit dispirited with the rotator problem which looks like a complete antenna dismantling to get the rotator out for a new potentiometer(?) to be fitted. Its certainly true that a contest quickly finds the weaknesses in your set up.

See you next year.

BAND QSO BONUS HQ DUP POINTS AVG

———————————

80 18 10 5 0 90 5.0

40 43 33 5 0 215 5.0

20 75 46 8 0 370 4.9

15 41 34 4 0 205 5.0

10 6 5 1 0 30 5.0

———————————

TOTAL 183 128 23 0 910 5.0

=================================

FINAL SCORE: 3 930

From: G4FNL
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2022 16:16:14 GMT

It has been interesting to read and compare notes with others for this years contest. I only submitted a check log last year because of Covid-19 restrictions. In previous years I have operated as an HQ station. This year, I was just a plain G station. I thought it might be much tougher – and it was.

I was in the High Power Assisted section, using a single Elecraft K3, Alpha 89 amp and a triband Yagi at around 50ft and dipoles + verticals on LF. I heard the usual suspects from G land – and my serial number was close – but Nick G4FAL , operating as M5DX did really well. I take my hat off to him – because he seemed to be everywhere that I was – but he was in the unassisted section and with a much higher serial number. I am grateful that he chose his short call. I think he did that partly altruistically – and I am very grateful.

Conditions seemed OK – and certainly a bit better on the Sunday morning on 10 and 15m. The K index was at 2 at the start – but the solar flux did peak to around 126 over the weekend. So, not ideal – but it could have been much worse. The period between 02:00z and 05:00 was truly awful  – no one to work and feeling  very tired. The only consolation is knowing that it’s the same for everyone else.  It was great to work the travellers – I’m so grateful that you guys made that huge effort.

I made 5 band QSOs with 5B4WN, 5Z4VJ, C56DF, GB5CC and VK6T. Terrific signals from Kevin who was S7 on my meter on 10m. Most others QSOs on that band were at much lower levels. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to work all the UK HQ stations on all bands which was disappointing.

It was tricky on 80m. The ‘Air Horn’ QRM was a thorough nuisance – not sure I received Andy 5Z4VJ’s number correctly. He was right underneath the signal. Unfortunately, we also had a G station that obviously wasn’t hearing and kept transmitting over the top of him which made things a bit tricky too.  Separately, there was a VE station who was calling CQ – and getting lots of callers from G stations  – but he didn’t hear them. Obviously, he must have had high receive noise levels.

I’ll be trying to improve things for next year.  I plan to be operating as SO2R and hopefully with some improved vertical antennas. Here’s my claimed score breakdown, according to N1MM.

Thanks to everyone for the QSOs….

73 Graham G4FNL