[UK-CONTEST] BARTG RTTY Contest - Bird Strike!

[MM0BQI]

Unusually I was confined to the house on Friday with time on my hands.  I had been working on my SO2R setup recently and decided to have a go in the BARTG contest this weekend.  Like a lot of folk I live in a suburban house with a small back garden (6x10).  I can use the flat roof at the back of the house as long as it is temporary and low profile.

I have nested HF dipoles on the flat roof and a loaded 40/80m dipole running along the roof and then down to the garden.  Works well with one radio but I was looking to have another 20/40m aerial available for my second radio.  I used one of my DXpedition fishing poles (10m), Ran the quarter wave for 40 taped to the mast and the 20m element held off about 12 inches with garden canes, worked a treat.  Only available mounting place is in the soil stack vent with a maximum distance of 3m from the other aerials.

Tests all went well with very little interference so didn't use my BPFs.  One exception was transmitting on 40m would wipe out receive on 20m.  Even at power levels of less than half a watt the 20m Rx was trashed (same problem on both rigs).  BPFs made a slight difference but not enough.  Need to investigate this further as I suffered the same problems in IOTA.

Contest started with madness on 20m and 15m almost opening so the plan was to tough it out on 20m then QSY to 15 once it opened. Made a couple of forays on to 15 but the band died here very early in the afternoon.  Saw lots of spots but nothing on 15 or 10.  It took me a couple of hours to realise I had blown the front end of the second rig!  That's the trouble with having poor conditions of late, expectations are very low and the difference between a blown rig and no propagation is marginal..  There was not a lot I could do so went solo with the K3.

In the end I managed 16 hours at the rig(s) and had a great time.  Targets were just met with the 6th continent getting into the log late Sunday morning.

Climbing onto the roof just after midday to remove the temporary aerial I saw the reason for my dead rig.  Quite a few white (seagull?) feathers round about the fishing pole which was bent over and touching the nested dipoles.  No sign of the gull so it must have escaped with hurt pride and a few bald patches. So 50w of RTTY RF was very closely coupled directly into radio 2.  Need to get that on the bench next week and see what the damage is.

All in all a good contest and great fun.73
Jim
CallSign Used : GM1J

Operator(s) : MM0BQI

Operator Category : SINGLE-OP

Band : ALL

Power : LOW

Mode : RTTY

Default Exchange : 001

Club/Team : GMDX GROUP

Software : N1MM Logger V11.1.3

Band QSOs Pts Cty Sec Cnt

3.5   116   116   3 0 0

7     167    167   9 0 0

14    271   271   37 18 5

21    48     48     4 0 1

Total 602  602  53  18  6?

Score : 256,452