[UK-CONTEST] G4PIQ AFS CW

[ANDY COOK]

266 raw QSOs, 2 dupes, 264 good QSOs. Rates 100/80/51/35. 
   
  Rather a hasty entry from me. Arrived at site 75 mins before contest started, untangled 80m dipole, wound up tower, strung out dipole, added feeder to beverage, found that beverage matching box was broken, configured PC. Didn't wind the tower right up since it was pretty windy, getting windier and I didn't want to have to wind down a pretty heavily loaded 100ft tower from full height in a storm in a hurry in the dark! This left me with a dipole with its middle at about 60ft and ends only at about 30ft. 
   
  I thought that activity was a bit down. The badly tied off dipole did fall down at one point and I had to go and fix it. This took 5 minutes, and when I came back my frequency was still clear! Good to see the GMs doing well from pretty early on. 
   
  As an experiment I also had the 4 square to hand, hoping that it would add some extra DX QSOs to the total. All I can report is a complete waste of time - I only worked 2 non EU stations - 5B4AGN and a UA9. Everyone bar the UA9 was as loud or much louder (as much as 20dB) on the dipole than the 4sq - even the relatively distant Europeans early on during the contest. So - fancy antennas are no help in AFS!
   
  There's been some discussion about SO2R. I've been running SO2R in AFS for years, at my old QTH with a Beverage 300m away from the Tx antenna. This enables you to receive pretty effectively in band and within just a few kHz of the transmit frequency. This year I had a very short (200ft) un-matched Beverage as little as 50m from the Tx antenna. The isolation was not so great this time, and signals were a bit low due to the faulty matching box, but in-band receive was OK once outside the first IF filter bandwidth of the FT1000MP where blocking was an issue. The MP is actually a pretty good radio for this because it has excellent wide spaced blocking dynamic range which is usually the limiting parameter in this scenario. I have tried a K2 in the same position and it really wasn't quite good enough. 
   
  Good luck to everyone in the SSB leg - I don't expect to be on for that. Many thanks to Bob, G4BAH for use of the station.
   
  73,
   
  Andy, G4PIQ