[UK-CONTEST] NFD - Contest Cumbria

[Ian & Stephanie Fugler (G4IIY)]

I echo the comments about the previous NFD reports.  It is interesting to 
hear about others' exploits.  Well, with apologies that it's a bit late, 
here is the story from Cumbria.

The three usual suspects (Ivan G3IZD, John G3WGV and Ian G4IIY) gathered at 
IIY's house at 10:30am on Saturday morning.  Given the wx forecast, we 
decided to operate from Ivan's camper van, rather than the tent.  With my 
wife having taken the children away to her family farm for the weekend, we 
had the property to ourselves, which meant sleeping arrangements were 
somewhat easier and Ivan could sleep in the comfort of the house.  In the 
end, the weather stayed dry all weekend, although it turned cool overnight. 
Still, the 2kw fan heater in a small camper van quickly turned it in to a 
sauna !

Having operated together now for a number of years, like others we have a 
routine that sees the station set up within 90 minutes.  We operate from the 
field adjacent to my house.  The aerial is a simple doublet suspended 
between two ex-army telescopic masts, fed with 450ohm feeder.  This year we 
had two ATUs to enable instant change over between 80m and 160m overnight. 
The rig is an FT1000 and logging is by John's own Starlog program.  The 
generator is one that I bought on eBay a few years ago.  It's a Chinese 
2.5kw (red) diesel version with a battery start.  I'd changed the oil the 
weekend previously and fired it up.  It only gets used once a year, but 
(touch wood) always starts first time and runs smoothly throughout the 
contest.

At about 12:30pm, we retired to the local pub, ate a decent lunch and sank a 
few pints.  We returned to the site at about 3pm.

This year, we decided to do something different.  On the Thursday before the 
contest, we notified Quentin that we would enter the Open section.  Now, 
Contest Cumbria doesn't do beams or multiple aerials.  And we don't do Big 
Knob/Little Knob either, or have more than one laptop.  Our Open section 
entry was the usual doublet, plus an HF6V Butternut, with half a dozen 
radials.  Although we only made 23 QSOs on 10m and just 43 on 15m, most of 
those were barely audible on the doublet.  And the Butternut was better in 
certain directions on 20m.  So, not a serious Open entry, but it's given us 
food for thought next year.

The contest passed in the usual fashion.  We started up on 10m, quickly gave 
up and moved to 15m.  Within about 45 minutes, we were running on 20m, which 
is an indication of how we found those bands.  At 7pm, John and I went back 
to the pub for a meal and a few more pints.  John and I shared the operating 
overnight and we found ourselves back in the pub for two hours on Sunday 
lunchtime.  I'm not sure other people would be so forgiving as Ivan.

As to conditions, well 10m was a hard slog for the 23 contacts.  We were 
some 30 to 40 Qs down on 160m, compared with last year.  We think the new 
ATU that we had dedicated to that band was not quite up to the task.  It 
became warm (not helped by the 2kw fan heater, I suspect).  Both 20m and 40m 
were the bread and butter bands, as usual.  The streams of DL/p stations 
were great and we are now used to the 2x1/P format for many of them.  The 
DL0 with single letter suffixes still leave me wondering whether I've missed 
a letter the first time they appear in the log.

Final QSO count was as follows:

  Band  QSOs  Points
 1.8  152  1088
 3.5  228   724
 7.0  346   999
 14.0 439  1244
 21.0  43   130
 28.0  23   146

Total 1231 QSOs
         4331 Points
          12 pints

Ian