[UK-CONTEST] IOTA Contest 2002 - GU8D

[G3SJJ]

Another most enjoyable IOTA Contest only spoilt by HF band conditions and poor performance of both of our beams on 15m.
Worldwide interest continued to grow despite conditions. From the DX Cluster spots at least, the number of operations in South Africa and Asia has dramatically increased. With the higher solar flux we were hoping for some good runs but they just didn't seem to materialise, our best hours were 140, 135 x 2 and 134. We only have 14 JAs in the log.

The GU guys have worked hard on installing a new heavy duty tower and have cleaned and re-furbished the TH6. Sadly we suffered a high local noise level on 15m, which really hampered both running and mult working on that band. If that wasn't bad enough, our A4S erected some 40m away in the adjacent field had a high SWR also on 15m. A quick check afterwards showed it resonant on 21900. The Acom 1000 kept reporting high SWR and wouldn't operate into it, so in the end we used the 40m diamond loop. It worked but with marginal conditions not as good as a resonant beam would have done! The noise was also apparent on 20m to some extent which might explain why we didn't give Andy PIQ his mult!

Interestingly Qs and Ms on 80, 40 and 10 are similar to 2 years ago when we came second to GM5V. 20m is slighly down but 15m shows a loss of some 210 Qs and 10 mults over our 2000 score on the band, (20 mults down on SSB, 10 up on CW, possibly proving that CW is easier to get through noise!!)

As in previous years our ratio of CW Qs was around 35%.

Highlights : Good team working, great contest, mixed mode working both on run and mult (we just love it), Fortnum and Mason tea bags provided and, would you believe, a mini fridge complete with a carton of milk (nice one, Richard GU2RS)

Other highlights, superb meal at Da Nello's on Sunday evening, great company.

Low lights other than the beam performance : Well how's this for a laugh, we were finding it hard going working mults in the first two hours, including the ones passed from the run station. Then we discovered the reason - the mike on the mult station operator's headset wasn't plugged in, but the mike on the sub rx ops headset, swung back over his head .... was plugged in. Whooops.

A bit more cleaning up to do but it's looking like :   2488 Qs    482 mults for    7,438,221 points

As regards the rules, I certainly have reservations similar to Chris WOJ. The Island DXpeditions definition is suspect. EG Isle of Wight with 3 different hourly run car ferries counts as Dxpedition, Scillies with no cars allowed does not count. I am sure there are plenty of other examples around the world.

One note of caution to Reflectees, though I know Don XTT will take into consideration : The views expressed on this Reflector only count for approx 1% of the total number of entries received, so don't go expecting massive changes to suit UK contesters.

Chris G3SJJ        (Other ops at GU8D were G3SVL, G4DRS, G4IIY and GU0SUP) (No QSOs logged with these calls this year!)


--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts ---
multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
  text/html
---