[UK-CONTEST] 144MHz UKAC last night

[Jonathan G0DVJ]

Hi John, Keith et al.

On 5 Jan 2011, at 12:08, John Lemay wrote:

> In particular, I failed to work any DL.

DL called us as a first QSO last night.

> I thought activity levels were good, but some well known calls were missing.
> Have they voted with their feet against the M5 ?

Agreed.  It was a pity not to work many of the regulars but I can totally see their point.  I hope it doesn't dis-suade the continentals to come on too.
We are planning to do the first few months and review if its worth it after that.  Would be a pity if the rule change caused less UK activity!

On 5 Jan 2011, at 09:30, g6nhu at me.com wrote:

> I wonder how people found the first 144MHz UKAC last night under the new multiplier rules?

We had a poor night compared to last year's sessions.  About 25 fewer Qs and lost many mults under the new M5 system.

> I know it's early with only one contest gone but has last night changed or reinforced opinions on the M5 multiplier rule change?

Hasn't changed my view.  
We spent time looking for extra UK mults and didn't find any.  Did finally manage to work Ray (CXM) and a station tagging along with him, but neither were mults as we already had (only) that square in GM.  Worked token GI and GU mults gratefully, but no GD or GJ last night.  East coast stations still need to answer calls from EU to get any distance QSOs (the trip through the hills of the north of England just doesn't cut it) even though now we don't care if all the DLs are in the same square.  

I gather that some EU administrations have now organised additional contests to co-incide with the UKACs in 2011 which is rather ironic given that they are worth less to us now.   

The number of UK squares available is pretty limited and constant  from here.  It then becomes a distance exercise and more of that is to be easily worked across a sea path than hilly land masses, so perhaps the erroneous idea that some had for east coast stations to spend more time  beaming UK will be shown to be false.

In the last year we invested in improving our station (antenna and rig) given that we have a very reasonable QTH for VHF.  It remains to be seen after a few months whether that investment was a waste.

The majority of our Qs are in JO01, IO91 and IO83 squares and only the latter give any reasonable distance points.  Beaming UK gets us little DX.

I still think the best way to focus these events on UK would be to have left the square mults alone and added postcode mults too, as is the case for some other RSGB VHF contests.

73 and thanks for all the points (and the mults)
Jonathan G0DVJ 
obo G4IRC (Ipswich Radio Club)
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