[UK-CONTEST] RRTC Contest.

[brian coyne]

As 3830 have not given any facility for reporting this one and I heard quite a few UK stations active i thought I would post a report here.
 
Probably not a contest we would normally take part in to any extent, this year was a bit different being a dress rehearsal for WRTC championship next year and we got personal emails requesting our support. If only for this reason I did anticipate that 3830 might take an interest. I reckon that Roger, as one of the referees had a very interesting time. Some of the R33 stations seemed to be head and shoulders above others both in terms of signals and ability. signals could have been vagaries of propagation although I was able to compare many only minutes apart when I was searching for mlt's. What was writ large though was just how weak they were with only e's and no proper propagation. They used similar setups to myself with 100w rigs, low tribanders and a dipole for 40 and this made me realise just how I must sound at distances over 2500km - ouch!
 
As for the contest itself  band cndx were pretty much the pattern of the last couple of months although sigs on 15m were much stronger than when I operated on that band for H2Q the previous weekend. What tactics to use? With a 10.00 am local start time there won't be dx on 20m for low power ops. I did hear some west coast one hour previously but come the hour they were gone. 20m is spotty at best in the hours around noon. My decision was to hit the highest band open 'til it died as we never know when it is likely to close and not return, these sporadic cndx are well named, I gambled that the last couple of hours would give the best return on 20 with local end time of  18.00, in the event I only got the last 45 minutes when I could run and catch the odd morsel of dx.Both 10 and 15m gave a great performance for the first couple of hours or so before they tailed off although they did remain open somewhat for the guys with power. It seemed to work for
 me with 230 q's in the log after 2 hours although it tailed off quite rapidly after that and later returns to the band needed hard work. 7mhz was useless for me, cq'ing brought only 1 contact so just searched for mlt's, obtaining only 4 zones plus 1 R33 stn. I caught only 12 different R33 stns in total out of the promised 18, not one on 10mtrs despite a couple of qsy's up there.
 
Looking forward to Rogers report with interest.
 
My final count was 530 nett q's with 68 mlt's, a rough calc gives around 130k pts, my logger didn't count some of the mlt's.
 
Frustrating experience after the test. RRTC Committee wanted logs submitted within 4 hours so they could do onsite awards etc to winners etc. I got mine in within 30 minutes only to have it rejected by the Robot. Despite 2 retries it was booted out again. Don't know what the problem is, the rejected info was things like lines in my postal address, mode, power etc, things that are in my standard template used for all contests and never given a problem before. Maybe the Robot has the problem although I have not seen any other reports of difficulty.
 
73  Brian   5B4AIZ  (C4Z).