[UK-CONTEST] IOTA Contest.

[brian coyne]

Worldwide support for our contest was terrific this year and it will be interesting to see just how many callsigns appear in the combined logs when we see the contest 'writeup'
 
As contests go this has to be the most level playingfield event in the contesting calendar. It doesn't matter where in the world you are you get 15 points for an island and 3 points for a fixed stn. Ok most active islands in the test are around Eu so central Eu is best placed but other than that scoring is the same for everyone, but again when sunspots are active the dx effect of the high bands offsets the lowband advantage to those central Eu stns.
 
In previous years I have only put in 4/5 hours and boy did I enjoy being able to do a full 12 hour entry this time around. I didn't get the tactics right, I was aware of the importance of striking the right balance between q's and mlts but in the event I didn't get it right.
The lowbands were my nemesis, two hours spent s&p'ing down there produced only 9/5 on 80mtrs and 66/22 on 40mtrs. Cq'ing down there was a waste of time with the low power poor antenna combination. the frustrating thing is that I have no way of improving the antennas at this site so need to work harder when on hf.
 
I read that EI5DI had loaded 140 odd c/s into SD who were expected to be active, plus a whole lot more who appeared on the day so why were they so hard to find or to work?
I got just 111 over the 5 bands, many of them two or three times over.
 
I obviously need more patience. As a low power op one rarely breaks piles easily so I set a limit of 3 minutes spent on calling anyone. it was a lesson that surprised me insofar as the number I had to walk away from unsatisfied. The easiest mlt's to catch were the small signals. Anybody loud had hordes of callers which seemed to go on and on because i would put them into memory and keep going back but the successes were rare.
 
Next time I shall study previous results, need to do much more s&p'ing to improve the qso/mlt ratio.as I note from 3830 claimed scores already that i have been well and truly 'creamed' by 4O4A who had about 250 less q's but around 30 more mlt's which I note came from the lowbands.
 
Considering we are still bumping along with that sfi of 68 and (previous day) 'A' index was far too high at 9, band cndx were good. Even static was not much of a problem on the lowbands, I could hear guys ok but they couldn't hear me!
 
A big vote of thanks is due to the travelling operators who put those islands on the air and make this contest the success and enjoyable event that this is.
 
12 hr section, CW, Low power.
819 QSO (after dupes), 111 Mlt's, Claimed score 488k.
 
Radio TS570 - 100w, 3 ELE Triband @ 15m, 40Mtr dipole, 80Mtr half sloper.
 
73  Brian C4Z   (5B4AIZ).