[UK-CONTEST] NFD G4OGB/P

[peter.jackson17 at ntlworld.com]

Scunthorpe Steel ARC G4OGB/P refused to throw their toys out of the pram and sent an entry in. I would ask all groups who just sent in  checklogs to have second thoughts, after all none of us are perfect. Otherwise I can see NFD will die.
We entered the open section, were 20mins late in starting as we had to replace the support legs on our trailer tower and spent time in trying to persuade our 3ele Western yagi to resonate at the bottom end on 20M. Then Murphy struck, the laptop we used last year had to have a new psu, this we found was a wide band noise generator! ferrite clamps didn’t have any effect, a replacement was found but not the same connector. Went home and made up an adaptor. For some reason although it appeared to charge the battery it didn’t. After 1.5 hrs it went into hibernation, at this point I could have joined it!.
We connected the noisy psu to charge the battery so we could transfer the log to another computer but had problems with it. One of our members went home for his laptop but it didn’t have the drivers installed for the usb-serial port adaptors. Back home for the driver disk. We now were back on air and lost nearly 2hrs.
At 0100hrs the heavens opened up and it poured down all night and Sunday. This effected the 450ohm ladder line so we were only using 60watts on 160-40M.
We have had problems using this feeder in wet weather before and should have learnt a lesson. Anyone else had problems with it? 
We made just under 800 Q’s. only worked 6 on 10M no ES. 160M noisy as usual with static crashes. Operators G3RAU G4OGB G3KNU G0HDV
I am surprised that G3LET/P could work all those with paper logging and a simple antenna system, me thinks we should have a serious rethink regards antennas for next year, and make up some decent open wire feeder.
73 Pete G3KNU