[UK-CONTEST] IOTA 2011 - G5W

[Don Beattie]

A brief report on the IOTA contest from here.

A two-man effort this year - Marios, G0WWW and myself, operating from home here 
in Shropshire.  Very little time to prepare for the contest, so the station was 
used "as is" in Multi-Single configuration. 


Marios did the hard work of running, and I spent the contest mult-chasing. 
Conditions a mixed bag for us. Pleasantly quiet on the LF bands - static was 
low, and we were hearing quite well. 20m was the mainstay band, and 15 and 10 
relatively disappointing, although always yielded the odd mult. Running on 15 
did not seem a really useful activity most of the time.

I got the impression that island activity was significantly higher this year, 
and we tried to capitalise on this. But my performance on the mult side was 
clearly not up to scratch, as we only ended up with 646 mults. I get the 
impression we were a bit too ready to use CW when I suspect we might have had 
better results with a higher proportion of time on SSB. But our natural 
preferences won the day.

Also strategically I think the last six hours needs to be much more dynamic than 
we were in choice of bands - looking back, I can see that there were small 
number of island stations (not mults) that we had not worked, and we should have 
moved the "run" station around a lot more to hoover them up.

But it's a great fun contest, and it was nice to find some really "odd-balls" 
around on the band, in terms of propagation. VK7 in the middle of the night 20 
over 9 on 14 MHz. A VE8 on an island found working JAs in the early hours, who 
managed to hear us on 20m. ZL from all sorts of strange directions. And an 
adequate smattering of JAs. The rest of Far East seemed well represented with 
some really big signals out of BY/BV.

The G island (non-mainland) stations were easier to work, I remember, than in 
pevious contests, and many were helpful in moving band for us. 

Thanks to all for going out onto those islands - without you, the contest would 
not be what it is. 


Here's the numbers, just for the record:

 BAND  SSB/IOTA   CW/IOTA  POINTS   AVG 
----------------------------------------
   80   98   43  161   56    2046  7.90 
   40  296   79  252   83    3693  6.74 
   20  532  101  454  106    5715  5.80 
   15  246   64  210   64    3018  6.62 
   10   80   25  111   25    1194  6.25 
----------------------------------------
TOTAL 1252  312 1188  334   15666  6.42 
========================================
        TOTAL SCORE : 10 120 236


 Usual equipment: 

2 x FT5000 + linears
40-10 yagi @ 80ft
10-20 yagi @ 60ft
90ft vertical (80m)
Dipoles for LF
K9AY and beverages (hardly used this year)

73

Don, G3BJ