I’ve literally just got home after leaving Dartford at 1pm, and it’s now 6pm we got struck by lots of engineering works in London and also between Didcot Park Way and Oxford. But you’ve not come to hear about my ramblings about the UK transport system.
Day 1:
We started the contest around 6am Saturday morning due to the lack of people being able to start at midnight but that didn’t stop us! I woke up at 7am and got myself ready to head for Dartford to help operate the contest. On arrival at lunch time we had around 240q but conditions didn’t seem that great and getting runs was difficult.
During the later part of the afternoon we hit trouble with the amplifier (AMPUK Explorer 1200) and this pushed us to barefoot with an FT1000MP Field (100watts) but we kept plodding on into the night getting the odd run and mostly doing a lot of S&P.
The night shifters where Bob VE3SRE, Robert G8ITB, Paul, M3JFM and myself we somehow managed to split it so everyone did there share of the operating, and while you wasn’t doing that you could catch up on sleep or just have a chat with one and other.
Even with 100w we where working into the states and Canada on 20/40/80 without too much difficulty and sometimes surprised people when we told them the situation.
Day 2
Sunday was going to prove interesting at 1am the clocks went forward one hour so as most people put it we lost 1hr of sleep! We kept at the low bands working the odd station on 160 but mostly sticking to 80 and 40m. At 9am most of the contesting team was back on site and got to experience the lack of runs and again kept to s&p on 20m and the picking up the odd mult on 15m.
By noon we removed the 160 and 80m dipoles to speed up taking down the station later on. Dave (G4BUO) arrived with a KW-1000 amp later on in the afternoon but I’m told by Simon (2E0CVN) it didn’t make much difference.
The end score was
Total: 1029 QSOs, Prefixes = 543, Total Score = 1,045,818
Equipment:
FT1000MP, AMPUK Explorer 1200, Yagi for 20-10m, Dipoles for 160, 80, 40m
Software Win-Test
More pictures at http://flickr.com/photos/m3php/sets/72157604324850942/�