[UK-CONTEST] IOTA Contest - M4U

[Jonathan G0DVJ]

Hi all,

For the second year running, the small Harwich Amateur Radio Interest  
Group (HARIG) ran their IOTA contest station as a demonstration of HF  
contesting on the site of the Colchester Radio Rally which took place  
on the Sunday.  This gave members of the Colchester Radio Club a  
chance to come and learn & help with the contest on the Saturday  
after setting up the infrastructure for their rally and gave all  
visitors to the rally the chance to see it on the Sunday.  Overall  
this was a great success generating substantial interest.  We took  
the chance to offer a few local visitors the chance to operate the  
station and are grateful to those who helped out in any way.  I  
believe a couple of new recruits will have been hooked for future  
events which is great news.

So the emphasis was on explaining what was going on rather than  
competitive scoring and high run rates but we did very slightly  
improve on last year's QSO count and claimed points total.

We had a problem with audio for the first couple of hours eventually  
traced to a problem with the headset we were using which was finally  
swapped out and the 40m dipole developed a fault which meant we had  
no QSOs on 40m this year.

Finally only one of the seven operators was able to operate CW so the  
balance of QSOs is rather imbalanced against the SSB count.

    Claimed Score:  441558

                 10m   15m   20m   40m   80m  Total

   Valid QSOs:    64   139   335     0   248    786
  Multipliers:    10    17    42     0    42    111
       Points:   324   633  1533     0  1488   3978

      CW QSOs:     0    25   155     0    38    218
     SSB QSOs:    64   114   180     0   210    568

     CW Mults:     0     2     8     0     7     17
    SSB Mults:    10    15    34     0    35     94

    CW Points:     0    99   561     0   210    870
   SSB Points:   324   534   972     0  1278   3108

Section:	Multi-Op, All, High, Mixed, Island (Non-DXpedition) EU005

Radio:   TS2000 + Anglian 1000L Linear Amplifier
Power:   350 watts max
Antenna:	Cushcraft A3S (20/15/10) & dipoles (40/80)
Software:	SDI by EI5DI


Overall a nice event with better conditions on the higher bands on  
Sunday IMHO.
Some of the operating practices on 20m when the band was busy and  
crowded were a little sad to hear.

Thanks to all those who made QSOs with us and to the organisers for  
volunteering their time.

73,
Jonathan G0DVJ
obo HARIG - M4U
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