[UK-CONTEST] IOTA - M8C EU-011 Cray Valley RS

[Dave Lawley]

This year's expedition was a lower-key affair, with fewer ops available 
the group decided to go for the 100w DXpedition section, which meant the 
beam, quad and rotators could be left at home.

G0FDZ, G7GLW and G0VJG were joined by two club members who had not 
visited EU-011 before, G4JED and M0KAZ. They arrived midday Tuesday and 
were on the air by early evening. The contest operators would be G0VJG 
G7GLW and G4JED, but it was recognised that the score would suffer 
severely as none of them is a CW operator, so I decided at the last 
minute to join them.

I booked a ticket on Wednesdat and flew out from Lands End airport to 
join the team on Friday afternoon. Just before the flight I had the 
pleasure of meeting Terry, G4AMT who I have worked numerous times over 
the years but never met before.

With some adjustments to the antennas and the availability of a CW op, 
we felt we were reasonably well set but realised it would be hard work 
with 100w, and that was before factoring in the truly abysmal 
conditions! We were only able to pick up four mults on 15m on Saturday, 
and although things were a little better on Sunday we were clearly much 
too far west this year and could hear plenty of stations in the noise 
that we had no chance of working with our 100w and dipole. 40m came to 
our rescue time and time again. 10m was like 15 only worse: on Sunday 
morning we had good conditions to central Europe - Slovakia, Czech 
Republic, Austria and Poland, but no volume of QSOs and no mults.

In the end we were pleased to pass 1600 Qs and attain a reasonable 
multiplier total. Antennas were dipoles for all bands at heights ranging 
from 25ft to 40ft, and verticals for 20 and 40m.

Once again we are grateful to the farmer who clears out a shed for us 
and lets us do whatever we like with antennas in the field - including 
WARC bands and VHF yagis this year we had 13 antennas up in the air. 
John, M1IOS is always a great supporter but it is sad to relate that the 
islands' only other amateur Mike, G3RPC passed away a few days before 
our trip. He was our initial contact on the island and made the M8C 
trips possible in the first place.

The islands (and much of Lands End on the mainland) was fogged out on 
Monday and all flights were cancelled, so I joined the others on the 
boat and got home about four hours later than planned, but enjoyed my 
brief trip to EU-011.

Dave G4BUO


  BAND  SSB/IOTA   CW/IOTA  POINTS   AVG
----------------------------------------
    80  207   41  135   37    3018  8.82
    40  449   62  307   67    6084  8.05
    20  203   61  209   51    2700  6.55
    15   18   12   64   22     630  7.68
    10    9    2    7    3      93  5.81
----------------------------------------
TOTAL  886  178  722  180   12525  7.79
========================================
         TOTAL SCORE : 4 483 950