[UK-CONTEST] SSB FD - G3RCM/P Sheffield ARC

[Nick Totterdell]

We operated from a playing field at Meadowhead to the south of
Sheffield. Security was a worry as the field is used as a short-cut by
many of the locals. As it was we only had a hook stolen off one of our
guy-wire turnbuckles - but even this was nuisance.

We all got extremely wet on Saturday morning while erecting the station.
I started operating in bare feet for the first hour, as my shoes were
sodden.

Equipment included an 80-foot tower with a 3-element tribander for 20m,
15m and 10m and inverted Vs for 80m and 40m.

Howling winds and heavy rain meant we had to continually check the guy
wires.

We only used one radio, an FT1k MkV with a quadra amplifier - no second
receiver. We used the ubiquitous MFJ digital voice keyer, which suffered
some RF breakthrough on 80m but this didn't appear to affect the
transmitted audio. Software was my home-brew logging which doesn't
calculate scores unfortunately. No cluster but I don't think it would
have helped much?

Conditions on the higher bands were disappointing with even 20m being
hard work especially on Saturday morning. To the east, 20m was extremely
noisy - I suspect this was the same static reported by others. We were
also surprised how early we had to drop onto 80m on Saturday, but then
20m was still open most of the night. Kept waiting for 15m to come to
life and had a spell of success there on Sunday morning.

On Sunday we had some sunshine and were very grateful that it had
stopped raining when we came to dismantle everything.

Some amusing items:

A YC station on 15m who refused to work us until we pleaded that we had
just heard him give a 001 serial number to another G station. 'so it's
002 then?', 'yeah OK then' came the reply.

Another station came up accusing us of 'Kindergarten' behaviour -
(giving everyone 5 and 9). We suggested that he tuned up the band, as
all the other stations would be doing the same thing - after which he
was apologetic.

   BAND    QSO    MULTS
----------------------------------
    80     290     20
    40     393     38
    20     277     48
    15      40     16
    10       2      2
----------------------------------
TOTAL     1001    124
==================================

CLAIMED SCORE: 464,256

OPERATORS: M1ERS 2E0TWS G0HSA G4FAL M3ZLT 2E0MJG

Thanks to all those who we worked over the weekend.

Nick G4FAL