Hi Bob

Conditions were pretty average here (what is about the BERU and a high A index?) but I’ve had a major station upgrade since the last BERU so that certainly helped make the contest fun.  

I recently took over a remote set up not far from where I live which boasts a 3 element SteppIR and as it turned out BERU was the first time I was going to be using it seriously in a contest. However the site didn’t have anything up for 80/40 so the day before the contest saw me out there putting up a rather ropy fan dipole which I am happy to say survived the weekend (although for all that effort the conditions on 80m were very poor and 40m wasn’t a whole lot better).  

Getting underway I normally focus on 40m but as noted above it was not great.  However 20m opened to G briefly so I managed to to keep the qsos ticking over.  20m turned out to be the money band for me accounting for half my QSOs.  Africa is always tough from here so the highlights for me were 5Z4VJ on 20m and 15m (that was a real surprise)and 5X1XA on 20m.  I heard C56DF but no cigar unfortunately.  It was also nice to be called by a couple of 9H stations and V31GX.

10m opened briefly to the Caribbean and VE on our Sunday morning with few takers, although I was chased incessantly by a bunch of Ws.  15m was overall pretty poor with only a very short long path opening to VE and the Caribbean for my efforts.  

On the whole though I was pretty pleased with 205 QSOs and 3550 points in about 13 hours of operating (with a lot of slow periods), which unsurprisingly was a massive jump from last year’s score. Even better Murphy didn’t visit which considering I am still getting to grips with remote operating was a nice bonus..          

Since I now have one, I did have to spend a bit of time trying to figure out the remote rules which seem to me to be somewhat bizarre.  Not that it affects me, but it appears that if I remote into my home station from another country then I can enter a single op category. But if I remote into my home station, in my case in ZL3, from say ZL4 then even though it is in the same country, I have to enter the remote category.  To be honest I don’t understand why non-home station remotes activated from another country or call area, or home station remotes in another call area have been singled out for special treatment.  Having now tried it and by comparing my score with the others in my team, in my view remoting is not an advantage and it has technical challenges you simply don’t face if you are operating in front of the rig.  Therefore in my opinion remotes should just fall into the relevant single op/multi-op category.

Finally it was great to work the various HQ stations.  Thanks to all who activated them.

73

Mark ZL3AB