[UK-CONTEST] M8C IOTA Contest 2005

[Dave Lawley]

After Chris G3SJJ's tale of woe from GU8D, I have to report that the 
smaller-scale Cray Valley RS expedition to the Isles of Scilly went 
without a hitch, and we found conditions during the contest greatly 
improved over last year, and much better than we could expect at this 
point of the cycle.

The team travelled on the Scillonian ferry on the preceeding Monday, and 
because we planned to take a few more things compared with 2004, we 
arranged for two cars to be transported in the ferry's hold. Ralph's car 
tipped alarmingly when the crane picked it up on the harbour-side at 
Penzance, but fortunately nothing spilled out.

We arrived on site at 1pm and found a good selection of steel scaffold 
poles waiting for us. We managed to get all the antennas up and the 
cables run back to the barn before leaving for the evening. Most of the 
team had driven the 300 miles to Penzance overnight so everyone was too 
knackered to put the station on the air that evening.

We managed to increase the height of the main antennas by 10ft over last 
year, which led to some problems as the rotator cables weren't quite 
long enough. Nevertheless with steel poles we couldn't get anything up 
really high and no support was higher than 40ft. The superb location on 
the east coast of the island compensated somewhat for the lack of 
antenna height.

The days before the contest were spent mainly on VHF (2m and 6m) and the 
WARC bands, and Chris G0FDZ again brought 10GHz gear, with a bigger 
dish, and his best QSO was over 550km. He and I also spent many hours 
trying to get the GPRS card (kindly loaned by G4TSH) to integrate with 
the Writelog network. It wouldn't do it at all on the W98SE laptops, we 
had a little more success with Win2000 but we couldn't get it working 
reliably and we realised that for the second year running we'd have to 
have a stand-alone cluster machine and could not feed spots into 
Writelog. I was concerned that our multiplier performance would suffer 
and this turned out to be the case.

Unlike last year there was no strong 10m opening at the start of the 
contest so Ralph 2E0ATY kicked off on 20, but the band was a zoo and he 
found it hard to copy with all the continental QRM and wide signals. all 
of a sudden the fact we were on EU-011 didn't seem to matter: very 
different from the situation before the contest. He strugged along while 
I knocked off mults on CW, and after about 45 minutes we felt 10m would 
be good enough to run and the rate picked up, but once we switched to 
15m we followed with 171Qs and 181Qs in hours three and four.

 From then on, we ran as hard as we could, and I kept telling them that 
conditions couldn't possibly stay as good as this: I felt a flare was on 
the way. After last year's doldrums it was great to be able to run 15m 
until nearly 2300z and 20m was still open when we left it just after 
0100z. I was becoming concerned that we wouldn't have enough time to 
pull in Qs and mults on 40 and 80m - what a nice dilemma!

The real revelation was the performance of Simon M3CVN on CW. Last year 
he had no code at all, but resolved to work on it and I got him started 
last autumn, using G4FON's excellent Koch software. This year he was 
confidently running CW pileups at rates of over 100/hour. It also meant 
that the team wasn't totally reliant on me to work the mults on CW.

My predictions proved wrong and although DX conditions weren't great, 15 
and 10m were wide open to Europe on Sunday as well. We never heard ZL 
but managed to get VK3 and VK7 on 20m for a couple of mults, and we 
worked a couple of dozen JAs (our best direction) which was an 
improvement on last year's single one.

We're extremely pleased with the QSO total, well over 3k Qs using very 
modest antennas, and I'm sure it's the mults that will let us down. We 
had said  we wouldn't go back again but the whole trip, including some 
great openings on 6m in the week beforehand, has made us want to return 
in 2006 and give it another go.

As well as my wife Denise, Nobby G0VJG and Ralph 2E0ATY had brought 
their partners and we managed to combine the radio trip with some 
walking and visits to the other islands, and of course the pubs. The 
Isles of Scilly are a wonderful holiday location. We met both of the 
resident amateurs on St Mary's, M1IOS and G3RPC.

Final score may differ a bit from the following as there may be one or 
two dodgy multipliers. I'm still not sure what the right CW/phone 
balance should be, but we could usually run faster on phone so that's 
what we did for most of the time.

band	CW Qs	mults	Ph Qs	mults
80	112	35	76	40
40	218	33	255	52
20	266	67	806	98
15	130	44	626	68
10	98	20	574	44

3,164 QSOs x 501 mults = 9.3M points

Operators G0VJG, M3CVN, 2E0ATY, G7GLW, G4BUO

FT1000MP Mark V + Quadra amp
FT000MP + Acom 1000 amp
80m dipole up 39ft
40m dipole up 37ft in a tree
20m - TET HB33SP tribander up 41ft
15m - 2el homebrew quad, centre up 40ft
10m - 2el homebrew quad, centre up 40ft
Butternut for receive
WX0B 6-pak antenna switch, coax stubs and Dunestar filters

Dave G4BUO