I was very kindly hosted by Chris G0DWV at his tremendous HF station on the East Coast of the UK and was the operator behind G6XX HQ station for this year’s Commonwealth. Contest. I won’t labour the point about the conditions – but I can concur that they were tough. The k-index at nearly 6 at the start certainly didn’t help. Through the contest, the bands did slightly improve – but I didn’t work VK or ZL on 10m and there were no ZL’s in my log on 15m, which is unusual. On the plus side, I did work 18 x 5 banders and 38 x 4 band QSOs.  Many of the QSOs needed several repeats and were at almost ESP levels – so I suspect my UBN may reflect that. [I normally aim for an error rate of less than 0.5%…..]

 

Thanks go to the travellers who certainly made the contest more enjoyable and to all the individual operators who persevered throughout. Around 50% of my QSOs were with UK stations. Here’s the numbers (I use N1MM for logging – but I don’t think it scores correctly and isn’t really suitable to use by an HQ station)

I had the following equipment / antennas available: IC7851 / K3 + Microham SO2R unit + 2 x SPE 2K Amplifiers, Optibeam 17 – 4 @ 100ft, a C31XR @ 60ft, another C31XR @ 60ft on another tower, 80m 4-Square and 80m dipole @ 60ft – so all the credit goes to Chris for his engineering skill in keeping this equipment working and having an excellent SO2R-equipped station. 

 

73 Graham G4FNL