[UK-CONTEST] MW5B CQWW CW SOSB(A) 80M HP ..G3WVG

[Ian Pritchard]

Well that was fun, what a great contest. 

I went to Shetland for CQWW 2009 and with G3TXF to Greenland in 2008.  This year for a change I thought I'd head for better weather. For two reasons I thought I'd attempt an 80m single band entry. It  meant that I could get some sleep between 10am and 2pm and secondly even a "simple" 80m antenna in a good location would be fairly competitive.

After much  "Google Earth" research I rented cottage on a farm on the west coast of Wales and the owners kindly allowed me to use their fields to put up a 80M quarter wave vertical and a beverage. I didn't stint on the radials and used a total of 1500m of wire to make a total of 80 radials laid on the ground. Some kind of phased array would have been much better but with just 24hrs set-up time too complicated for a one man operation.
   There was a power line coming  to the farm so I figured out (google earth again!) that I would 
need around 250M of coax to get the antenna away from the potential 
noise source.  I used Westflex 103. for the TX antenna and for Rx. Beverage RG 58mini.  In retropect  I could have put the transmit antenna closer to the shack and then long runs of thin coax for the beverage rx. antenna..Doh!.

I had no idea how good  my signal would be so I deceided to go for the assisted section but  after a couple of hours I realised I was getting out  well and I wished I had stayed in the unassisted section but by then it was too late.  I reckon that I  got no more than  4 or 5  extra mults via the cluster and some of those took quite a  while because of  the wall of continual callers.  Even when I'd made the QSO I couldn't be absolutely sure that my call had been logged correctly. 

I was very pleased with the way things worked out and ended up with 2795 QSOs / 31Z / 125 C. 
Highlights: For the first 4 hours of the contest I was running at  175qs/hr.  more like 20M than 80M.. 
Lowlights: Eastern Eu stations (why them I wonder) calling CQ on top of me.

Nigel has kindly put up some of my  pictures on his website.. 
http://www.g3txf.com/dxtrip/MW5B/MW5B-10.html

Superb fun ..Can't wait until next year ..73 Ian G3WVG