[UK-CONTEST] CQ WW SSB M4A (M/2 HP)

[mark.haynes at yahoo.co.uk]

Hi Dom,

Thank you for posting this. A very interesting read. Its so nice to hear about the level of participation at M4A, also the fact that so many youngsters are on the team. Well done for building a super team.

Unfortunately I missed out on CQWW Phone this year due to house moving, but am looking forward to returning to K3LR in a few weeks for Code. Look forward to working you and many others.

Cheers,
Mark M0DXR


Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

-----Original Message-----
From: Dominic Smith <m0blf at domsmith.co.uk>
Sender: uk-contest-bounces at contesting.com
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2010 20:03:25 
To: <uk-contest at contesting.com>
Subject: [UK-CONTEST] CQ WW SSB M4A (M/2 HP)

Hi everyone,

As usual, Cambridge University Wireless Society was active in CQWW this 
past weekend.  We again had a very large, young team (14 operators, 10 
of whom were under 30), having a wide range in contesting experience.

For the past few years we've come 2nd to the very worthy winners at G6PZ 
in M/S but this year we decided to make a tactical move to M/2 in the 
hope of standing a chance at winning something. We just hope Paul didn't 
decide to switch too!

This email is quite long as I know that some of you like reading these 
reports. For those who don't, I'll give the claimed score straight away:

  BAND   QSO  CQ DXC DUP  POINTS   AVG
--------------------------------------
   160   183   6  45   1     184  1.01
    80   716  22  84  11     920  1.28
    40  1047  33 102  16    1726  1.65
    20  1423  36 117  13    3181  2.24
    15  1086  38 120   8    2508  2.31
    10    77  14  38   0     137  1.78
--------------------------------------
TOTAL  4532 149 506  49    8656  1.91
======================================
        TOTAL SCORE : 5 669 680

Operators       : G3ZAY, G4AXX, G4EAG, G4KNO, M0BLF, M0DEG, M0HSW, 
M0LRB, M0SKI, M0TDG, M0TOC, M0VFC, M0YCS, MW3YMY

This was the first contest from 'Woop Woop III', the new CUWS shack 
which, after several years of planning battles and fundraising was 
finally built this summer. Thanks have to be given, therefore, to 
everyone who was involved in that project, without whom we might not 
have had anywhere to operate from this year. The new shack is larger, 
warmer and better-designed than its predecessor, and this certainly made 
the contest a more comfortable experience than it has been recently.

The extra space probably also contributed to a distinct lack of 
interaction problems between the stations this year, which was a welcome 
change. The only issue that we encountered -- relevant to the discussion 
on this list earlier -- was that one of the three computers lost a lot 
of time on its system clock during the contest (they had been 
sychronised at the start).  The only explanation seems to be that it was 
sitting on top of the TL-922 and that seems to have managed to upset the 
CPU clock quite badly. The computer crashed twice in the test and lost 
over a minute within a couple of hours! (Don't worry, we finished at 
midnight according to an unaffected computer, which remained within a 
second of UTC throughout.) I just had to spend a couple hours last night 
putting the log back into chronological order :)

Bands were obviously in a poor shape this year, worse than we'd hoped, 
but the 80m phased verticals and 40m four-sqaure did well on the lower 
bands.  We could have done with something better than the low dipole on 
160m, however. For 20m, we had a 4-element monobander, and that was our 
main workhorse. 15m went well but we were limited to the Stepp-IR after 
problems in the construction of the monobander which we had bought meant 
that it could not be assembled. For 10m, we had a 5-element monobander 
but the band wasn't open enough to make much use of it.

Thanks as always to Mark G4AXX, Simon G4EAG and Andy G4KNO from the 
Granta Contest Group for the loan of a trailer tower and assistance 
operating, and to Martin G3ZAY for organising the installation of the 
extra equipment -- not an easy task so close to the start of the 
University term.

I've put a few photos at 
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnas2/sets/72157625181230539/with/5143279285/>

73,

Dominic M0BLF.
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