Although I didn’t set out to be over active in this contest this year due to pressures of university work, I decided that putting a few hours operating time wouldn’t cause too many problems.

Saturday I allowed dad (M3JFM0 to enjoy 20m in full swing, while I got other bits and bobs done which I needed to complete, at 6:00pm when dad came back inside the house I decided to take a bash at the contest for an hour or two before dinner.

As I wasn’t going in to seriously I wasn’t overly worried about the software application which I was going to use and because of this I decided to use my main digital program which is MixW after setting it up for the contest, I was ready to hit the bands.

First band I went to was 20m just out of pure interest to see if it had closed in the UK (well oxford anyways), I was surprised to hear a couple of loud Americans on the band so I quickly worked them and decided to move to 20m where I was going to stay for most of my operating time.

40m seemed much better using the Husler vertical than the 40m dipoles and I was able to work a good number of stations before dinner, around 8pm I returned back into the radio room for another bash on the bands, this time checking the lower part of 40m after I worked everyone I could hear doing S&P I decided to check out 80m.

Although 80m isnt my favourate band due to the fact I can hardly work anything on this band, which i think is more due to lack of patients on my side as I seem to need the adrenalin rush to keep going after checking 80m I worked around 2 stations and decided i’d had enough and went back to 40m.

9pm I closed the station down, and called it a day! I had a great time operating for the short period of time which I was on and was nice to find some time for radio insted of working on university projects and other jobs I needed to do.