[UK-CONTEST] GM0ADX - IOTA report

[GM3YEH]

The GM0ADX crew from Kilmarnock and Loudoun ARC (GM3OZB, GM3YEH, GM3ZRT,
GM4OSS, GM0DJG, MM0BIM) went to Skye again for the IOTA contest this year.
This is the second time there.  We travelled up on Thursday and returned on
Monday.  The weather was fairly kind but during the contest we had some
quite high winds and rain...but the trusty old 1940 tent withstood all that
the elements could throw at it yet again!  It was a bit cold at night.  One
down-side to having some settled weather was that the midges were in full
flight...even the locals were running for cover.

The run station was 400W with a triband beam (10/15/20) at 30 feet, quarter
wave vertical for 40m and an 80m inverted V dipole on the 30 foot mast.  The
multiplier station was 100W with a triband beam (10/15/20) at 30 feet with
40m and 80m inverted V dipoles on the 30 foot mast.  Logging software was
N1MM.   The run station was in the old tent in the middle of a peaty field
of heather (perfect for midges).  The mult station was in a garage loaned to
us by the owner of the site.  The garage was also the canteen area for the
weekend.

Our target is always the same for this contest - try to do better than last
time.  Last year we reached our highest QSO count ever with 1,500 contacts.
 This is such a high score for us that none of us were confident that we
could beat that by very much - so we settled for trying to manage 1,500 Qs
again.  Multipliers last year were a bit low at just under 200 and we were
sure we could get more mults if we made that our main target.  The team is
fairly well populated with CW operators but we're not so lucky for SSB so we
always have a bias towards CW Qs.  This obviously costs us SSB multipliers
so we need to try and address this issue for future years and see if we can
get more of a balance..

On the run station we got off to a good start and were over 200 Qs after a
couple of hours. It always give the team a good feeling when we manage to
rack up a decent number of contacts at the start.  On years when we've
started more slowly there is a general feeling of needing to 'catch up' all
the way through.   The Q rate stayed fairly good throughout and we managed
to keep pace with our rate for last year.  Some good DX popped up now and
again but no big DX openings at any time.  We discovered 10m wide open for
the last 90 minutes but got into that horrible situation where your Q rate
actually drops because so many stations are calling and it's difficult to
winkle them out.  We actually had to swap operators at one point to avoid
the pileup causing madness!

The guys on the mult station kept it active for the full 24 hours and this
paid dividends and got us a significant increase in multipliers compared to
last year.

So the target for this year was achieved - Q count consolidated and mult
count increased.  Here are the numbers:
 Band  Mode  QSOs  Pts  IOTA
   3.5  CW     131     921   25
   3.5  LSB    107    1077   35
     7  CW      323    1665   41
     7  LSB     73      879     40
    14  CW     581    2475   44
    14  USB     77     783    29
    21  CW      91     525    20
    21  USB     29     387    25
    28  CW     101     507   10
    28  USB     15     105    5
 Total  Both  1528    9324  274
Score: 2,554,776

Short video here:
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rBl9JQcpqQ

73 Barry GM3YEH.