[UK-CONTEST] NFD

[peter Jackson]

Hi, there seems to be a lack of NFD reports this year, maybe everyone is still recovering. So here is a report of the Scunthorpe Steel ARC G4FUH/P.
This year due to lack of manpower we entered the restricted section, BTW who the devil organised "Train the Trainers" at Finningley radio club in Sandtoft on the first day of NFD? this robbed us of two of our helpers.
The weather was fantastic, temperature in the caravan reached 29c on Saturday. I feel sorry for the Irish lads as we had that weather the previous weekend when we provided the communications for a local Triathlon, what a difference a week can make.
Sporadic E was way down on last years with only 41 Q's on 10M these were worked in the first hour and despite frequent visits and sending a few cq's we didn't work any more.
Our antenna was 264ft doublet 60 ft of which was horizontal at 10M with the ends sloping down to the ground running East West, fed with open wire feeders and tuned with an auto ATU built by Les G4OGB from a design in Radcom. This worked brilliantly, press the bandchange on the rig one tap on the key and you are ready to go. This enabled us to make many more band changes than we normally would have done, and it certainly improved our score.
The caravan was given to us by one of our members Dave M0NEY and Stan G3RRL made us an operating table at one end. The van has a cooker and fridge, it was like operating from home!
We like to make NFD into a social occasion for all the club members. Tom G4JRY supplies all the food, beefburgers on the first day and fish and chips from the chippy Saturday evening. Breakfast on Sunday morning is a full English AH the smell of sizzling burgers sausage bacon and eggs wafting through the cool early morning air makes the saliva glands run. His wife cooks Goulash for Sunday lunch and we have a choice of red or white wines, not the posh stuff that Chris G3SJJ drinks, sorry Chris couldn't help that! it comes from the supermarket.
You might think after all that we don't treat NFD seriously but we do, but with only three ops it's hard work with two of us well into our 70's. 
We made 904 Q's which to us ain't bad. Best DX VK8AV on 40M Saturday afternoon. No real problems except for a bit of rf getting into the system on 20M which sometimes, after sending /P it sent a train of P's.
SD worked fine as usual I would never think of using any other contesting program.
I enjoy working the night shift, I feel tired up to 2.00am then get a second wind, but oh boy do I sleep well Sunday night, sleep like a log wake up in the fireplace, ( apologies to Tommy Cooper)
73 Pete G3KNU