[UK-CONTEST] IOTA - GW4TTA (EU124)

[Stewart Rolfe]

After a year off due to caravan problems our club was at Holyhead breakwater again as GW4TTA - EU124. Two of the regulars were not available so it was me plus a handful of club members most of whom treat a contest as just another special event station, and who don't seem to realise you can't roll up with half an hour to go to prepare for a field day style contest attempt.
We were entering Multi-One and fortunately no problems were encountered on Saturday morning setting up the 2 stations with their respective doublet and multi-band vertical, and the local networking fired up ok too. I'd screwed this up the day before trying to get internet access via
 a usb broadband dongle on the master netbook; I've now been persuaded that I misunderstood N1MM networking and that it won't work with 2 interfaces on one pc, dongle to the internet and wired ethernet to the second pc. So once again we were unassisted in an assisted category but we grin and bear it.
The doublet on the run station seemed to have lots of electrical noise on 10m which could have masked weak signals there; another reason why you set up in time to be able to re-site generators and mains cabling if necessary. Conditions generally didn't seem too good but activity was high and I had no problem at all staying awake the whole time. 20m had signals all night and 15m was fun too. The mult station was of limited use since there was only myself to help those operating it, and often I'd have to break off running to sort out a
 logging problem and occasionally had to call a station again to correct the wrong serial number that had just been given out. Two of the newer ops showed an enthusiastic understanding of the situation though and that seemed to make it all worthwhile.
A mixed mode contest with low power and wire antennas shows just how much more effective cw can be over phone. No-one including me could get any runs going on ssb but I never had a problem with cw. It was a shame our cw maestro was on holiday in Cyprus at the weekend, without a radio..! I was the only cw op in the end and hardly any mult hunting was done on cw as a result. 
Nevertheless we seemed to have done significantly better than last time out 2 years
 ago, and I wonder if there were more IOTA stations around this year. We didn't stress test the new 6 band/mode change rule, partly because passing stations over to the mult station would have been unfair on the novice ops; I assume that's allowed under the mult station rules? Thinking about it I didn't come across much band hopping at all, and our mult station was only asked once to move. Maybe this new rule put people off?
Despite the 'issues' it was a fun 24 hours, the weather was windy but generally dry, and plenty of hands were there to take down. Next time I won't forget the second pair of headphones  - at 3am the blast from the (ssb) mult station speaker 10 feet away gets incredibly wearing!
 Band  Mode  QSOs    Pts  IOT         3.5  CW     112     970   25         3.5  LSB     14     130    6           7  CW     168    1300   39           7  LSB     91     995   22          14  CW     258    1710   35          14  USB     37     485   30          21  CW     192    1130   17          21  USB    103     845   29          28  CW      12     100    4          28  USB      3      45    3       Total  Both   990    7710  210
Claimed Score : 1,619,100
73,
Stewart, GW0ETF