[UK-CONTEST] NFD

[peter Jackson]

I too enjoy reading about the ups and downs of other club's experiences in Field Day. This is the report of Scunthorpe Steel ARC G4FUH/P ( known to some as G4FUS/P) but more of that story later, (apologies Kirsty Walk).
This year, because our regular site was taken over by the Steelworks Gala,  we travelled 6miles to Primrose Hill which is the Glandford scouts camp site. 

This is a very pretty spot with lots of wild life, birds rabbits and deer. We didn't take our normal masts as we decided to use the trees, bad mistake. My efforts to send a fishing line over the trees with my rod was pathetic, so we ended up with low  264ft doublet.

Murphy had left us alone the last few years but this time he chose to camp out with us. The set-up was IC746, old laptop running Win98/SD, winkey with a keyer at the output of winkey (never liked the 'feel' of the winkey keyer) a Auto ATU made by Les G4OGB from the design out of Radcom. Everything setup ok except when we tried topband the screen of the rig went white, matching our faces! made funny noises from the speaker, on key up it had changed bands, never seen anything like this before. Eventually we found that disconnecting the keying lead from the external keyer cleared the fault. So I went home and soldered a cap across the line this fixed it, but on 20M if we used the keyer it locked the rig on TX, connecting it to a seperate  psu cleared this problem. 
This was an identical station as last year which gave no problems! Then the auto atu didn't like the antenna on 160 so we replaced the open wire feeder with a longer length of 450 ohm ladder line, this it liked but turned out to be another mistake. During the night a thick fog descended the swr went up and the power went down so on the three LF bands,during the night we were only running about 30Watts and we were unable to get good runs. On Sunday the fog lifted and the sun came out and the power went back up. Strangely the RFI never effected the computer although we did have a sort of crash when the computer came up with a 'going into hibernation mode' message. This locked the computer so we had to do a crt alt del. When we rebootted SD we had lost all the Q's numbers per band, thankfully all the log was intact and it all came right in SDCheck.
Before the contest we had ES propagation on 10m, this disappeared when the contest started and it never really got going for us.
We started on time working well, but many stations coming back with G4FUS/P, we must have had at least 60 stations with H & S dyslexia. Last year we had a UBN report from DARC with 24 stations logging our call incorrectly.

Score 757 Valid Q's 2977 pts in the restricted section. I think we were more restricted than others!

Lessons learnt for next year:

New call sign with no S or H in it.
Battery supply for the keyer.
Different rig.
Antenna at the correct height.
73 Pete G3KNU