[UK-CONTEST] IOTA Contest: by a VHF-er

[David & Wendy Dodds]

Hi all.

I hope you had a successful weekend's contesting on your various islands

Not to be left out I thought I'd have a play from home, despite my severe allergy for all bands below 70MHz! There were one or two hiccups to this, namely:
1) Rig u/s due to a locked-up VFO spindle.
2) No antenna
3) No suitable logging software
But nothing stops a determined GM4WLL.

Having tried various suggestions for freeing the VFO spindle I realised I could tune using the up/down buttons on the mic. It's hard to begin with, but with some practice becomes remarkably easy. Unfortunately the band-change function uses the VFO, so I was stuck on 10m. Not the end of the world, I thought.

I have several eye-bolts in the house walls, which I use to sling temporary dipoles. (They also come in handy for attaching guy-ropes to masts for the grown-up bands), so it was easy to rig up a sloping dipole for 10m.

Onto the web and downloaded SDI. Having recently been lectured by Jim MM0BQI on my affinity for GJV I thought maybe I should try out SD.

Ready to roll. Switch on at start of contest and 10m is....dead. Oh b****r! Then I realised that I might be able to change band using the rig's memories. I've never used them so they were still set for various 10m frequencies which equated to 70cm eme frequencies used by the late GM3JFG, who had the rig before me. Luckily one memory held 14.245, the VHF net, so I was able to use that to change band. A quick foray to the garden with some wire and I had a 20m dipole!

Other household duties restricted operating to a few hours spread through the contest and with 100w to a dodgy low-down dipole on one band only this was never going to be an entry, but I thought I might pick up the odd IOTA.

I made 71 QSOs, with 32 IOTAs, which was better than I had expected.
Amongst the better IOTAs were:
OX3LG in Greenland (NA220)
WP4BV in Puerto Rico (NA099)
FM5GU in Martinique (NA107)
There were loads of EU ones, some of which could be rare for all I know!

I'll certainly give IOTA a proper go next year. Not only is the island-chasing fascinating, it was very noticeable that the usual vast numbers of over-powered east Europeans simply weren't there, which made it much more enjoyable than some DC (sorry, HF) contests I have operated in.

And SD? I must say I like it, so I'll give the VHF version a go. Nonetheless there were a couple of things I don't like - it won't accept partial calls for matching to the check-log, only prefix or full call, which I found irritating. The other issue I found was that, when I transferred the cabrillo log to Logger the IOTA references were rejected so I had to key them into Logger manually. I don't know if this is an issue with SDI or Logger.

73 de David GM4WLL



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