[UK-CONTEST] VHF NFD from a Fixed Sweeper

[g6nhu at me.com]

I'd like to offer a view on VHF NFD from the perspective of a Fixed Sweeper.  This will be a fairly long post.

Over the year I've made a few changes to my station at home (there has been lots of advice from people on this list) and I was really looking forward to VHF NFD as a test of my station.

Saturday morning dawned and it was a gorgeous day.  One of my weekly chores is to pick up bread from the bakers and cheese from the Co-Op on Saturdays so I headed off nice and early.  I was in the bakers at around half past seven and after that it was too early to go to the Co-Op so I drove up to the site I know G0VHF/P use to see if anyone was about.

I parked up not far from the tents but it was absolutely silent, there was no sign of anyone around so I decided not to disturb the sleeping beauties and went off to carry on my shopping.

In the first hour of the contest I worked 19 stations including GM and GI.  That's very slow going for a normal NFD station but not being able to call CQ does tend to slow things down somewhat and I consider that a reasonable rate for just S&P.

The QSO rate dropped fairly quickly after that until I was struggling to find new stations to work and I finally crashed out to bed just before 01:00 having worked 71 stations.

I set my alarm for 04:00 so that I could take advantage of any tropo that may have been about as the sun came up and I was rewarded by some good DX including Switzerland and Spain.

Sunday was very difficult, I only added another 28 stations to my list in that eleven hour period from 04:00 to 15:00.  It was quite frustrating at times to hear stations I'd not worked who were talking to other stations but I wasn't able to work them as it wasn't their frequency and I never heard them calling CQ. I know I missed out on a couple of multipliers because of that but that's what happens when one is working just S&P.  Although the Backpackers contest coincided with the last few hours of VHF NFD, a lot of them seemed to be working S&P to pick up all the NFD stations so that didn't make much difference to us sweepers.

I ended up the weekend with 99 QSOs of which (I think) 43 were in the list of registered stations and therefore multipliers.  It was hard going and I was absolutely exhausted at the end.

I did work two fixed stations who I heard calling CQ (and made a note of this in my log) and I hope these people will abide by the rules and only submit a checklog rather than an actual entry and it has disappointed me to see that one fixed station I heard calling CQ has already put an entry in. I didn't work that one so they're not in my log and therefore there's no proof.

I'm glad I did this but I'm not sure I'd put so much of an effort into it again, I went through periods of absolute boredom as I was tuning around trying to find new stations and towards the end I was lucky to work two an hour.


73
Keith, G6NHU
Martelly Tower Group, G0PKT



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