[UK-CONTEST] SSB FD GW6GW/P

[Peter Day]

On 06/09/2011 00:33, G0JKZ wrote:
> I'll be honest and say the same... our club is suffering from a lack of
> operators... nobody actually wants to use radio these days....
>
> George
> G0JKZ


Same here in the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire! We (Sheffield 
ARC) get quite a few people through the FL and Intermediate exams every 
year (and one or two Full tickets) but I haven't heard most of them on 
the air yet. Those that do come on are usually on the local 70cm 
repeater using their handhelds!

The biggest problem we have is that there are only two of us used to 
high pressure CW contests and probably only 4 in the whole club who can 
read Morse at above 5wpm (!) so we don't do NFD as a result and the 80m 
CC results suffer similarly.

SSB FD should be popular on the face of it but we struggled this year 
without 4 of our 7 experienced contest ops who promised to come not 
showing up. Two of our newer and inexperienced members came to the 
rescue and did the 'red eye' shift from 0000-0600z. Had they not I 
wouldn't have had the three hours sleep I finally got. As a result, our 
performance in the restricted section was down somewhat on what I wanted 
and certainly no where near what we achieved last year in the Open 
section when we had G4FAL's gear, tower and beam!

We used the club's FT950 into a homebrew OCFD configured inverted V 
style and matched through an auto ATU. I would have preferred a 132ft 
doublet but some of our potential ops cannot use a manual ATU !!! (auto 
ATUs rarely handle doublets on every band)

The 102nd multiplier was worked just 15 seconds from the end of the 
contest :-)

Summary below:

  BAND   QSO DUP DXC  POINTS   AVG
----------------------------------
    80   158   1  16     760  4.81
    40   137   1  22     619  4.52
    20   110   0  35     450  4.09
    15    42   0  25     144  3.43
    10     5   0   4      19  3.80
----------------------------------
TOTAL   452   2 102    1992  4.41
==================================
       TOTAL SCORE : 203 184


Photos at: http://krystynahaywood.co.uk/sarc/2011/09/2206/


73

Peter G3PHO

Sheffield ARC (G2AS/P)