The weekend has passed and the bands have returned to the usual semi quietness after the WPX SSB contest took for 2 today’s of contest activity, this year instead of taking part with the Cray Valley Radio Club I was invited to go down to G6PZ , the last time I had been to the station was last year for Marconi Day to operate GB6MD.
Friday morning soon arrived and I took the train down to the station, unlucky for me there was signalling problems between Swindon and Bristol which messed things up a bit and I had to change twice around the edge of Bristol before catching a connection to Weston but arrived and met by Mark (M0DXR), Simon (M0CLW) and Simon (2E0CVN).
Once arriving at the shack there was some antenna work to be done like cranking up the MonstIR which was seriously hard work as the antenna weights a ton! after a while though we soon had it up. and finished putting up the Clark field mast up which Paul had already setup and got it up to 30m it looked huge! which was to support the 160m antenna once we built that.. once all the antennas were up it was dark and we retreated to the shack to get the computers setup.
Simon (M0CLW) on mults duty
The contest started soon after and I was on the mults station on 40m was easy to pick-up the multipliers then but as the hours progressed it soon started to get harder, we did have an issue in the very early hours when the 160m antenna wouldn’t tune! but that was soon fixed in daylight, but we got some good runs into NA on 40m and good conditions into the far east. Conditions Sunday towards the end of the contest were not so great.
Score breakdown
BAND QSO DUP PFX POINTS AVG
-----------------------------------
160 145 0 37 294 2.03
80 743 8 317 1784 2.40
40 868 8 317 2987 3.44
20 1438 8 415 3218 2.24
15 127 0 75 337 2.65
10 0 0 0 0 0.00
-----------------------------------
TOTAL 3321 24 1161 8620 2.60
===================================
TOTAL SCORE : 10 007 820
The beams
The station performed great and was a breeze to use the IC7800 & IC7700 and we put the built in voice keyers to good use, all the options seemed in similar places on both and the filtering was effective for contesting environment. The stacked SteppIRs were excellent making working into NA pretty easy! and having a beam on 40m was very cool.
Overall had a fantastic weekend, great company and decent pileups, I was however was completely shattered Monday morning while returning home!