[UK-CONTEST] CQWW CW G6PZ M/S

[Paul Beecham]

So the time came for our favourite contest of the year and whilst we
had a relatively small team for this year’s event, we were eagerly
anticipating having some good local competition with M6T who were back
on the air in multi-single.

A few first-time occurences started on Friday afternoon whilst we were
in the field erecting the 80m 4-square — snow started to fall and
settle on the ground, something I personally have never seen in all
the time I have been contesting from G6PZ; temperatures were so cold
the first night (it got down to -18C in Wales), we were actually cold
as, coincidentally, the shack storage heater gave up the ghost late
Friday for some reason! In the past, this wouldn’t have mattered, as
we normally rely on the heat thrown out from the amps to keep the
shack warm!

We worked into far east on 160m, something we haven’t achieved in recent years.

Worked (note: ran) North America on 10m on the second day, which
included working guys who weren’t the ‘usual suspects’; we worked into
the mid-west and therefore zone 4, too.

We are now totally over the moon with our [now finalised] LF setup —
the 80M 4-square continues to be a real gem but also our new  30m
centre-loaded 160m vertical absolutely rocks. It’s pretty damn good on
receive but coupled with the Beverage and rx 4sq set up its a powerful
tool.

Packet pileups just continue to be insane — it is simply unbelievable
how ops can simply plough on into a pileup without even listening
first to see if they can hear the DX.

A couple of the packet pileups late on Sunday evening were beyond
insane, and frankly just reeked of desperation more than anything!

We met with the M6T guys on 3730 just after the contest to do the
US-style 3830 line-by-line, band-by-band breakdown, and whilst they
beat us in the end (their 11.5mil versus our ~11.mil - congratulations
to them!), it’s amazing just how close the two stations were in terms
of QSO and mult figures. We lost out quite a bit on 10m to M6T, and we
have put this down to geographical differences between the two
locations but it was certainly great to break the 10mil point barrier.
We will see how things stand after log checking ?.

Thanks as always to all those who worked G6PZ. It’s just a shame we
have to wait 12 months until we can do this all again!

Ops: G6PZ, Gi0RTN, G3TJE, G4DRS, M0CLW

 BAND   QSO  CQ DXC DUP  POINTS   AVG
--------------------------------------
  160   345  21  86   2     648  1.88
   80   994  31 124  18    2032  2.04
   40  1949  39 141  40    4362  2.24
   20  1231  37 129  12    2778  2.26
   15  1041  38 142  11    2343  2.25
   10   148  24  78   0     286  1.93
--------------------------------------
TOTAL  5708 190 700  83   12449  2.18
======================================
       TOTAL SCORE : 11 079 610


73 de Simon M0CLW on behalf of team G6PZ