[UK-CONTEST] NFD G4OGB/P

[Peter Hobbs]

I also used 450 ohm ladder to end feed the long wire and didn't varnish 
it (as is recommended) because the plan was to replace it with open wire 
when the weather forecast became clear, but time ran out to make the 
spacers!  The CG-3000 auto-tuner took care of any rain effects on the 
feeder - yes it was much the same down here in Sussex, but started 
earlier!  In fact, the weather may well have helped the vertical as the 
field soon became pretty soggy.

After your experience, there has to be something to be said for paper 
logging!  I did have a bad noise problem on 160m from the diesel genny 
though, which had only been used down to 80m.  The trifilar 9:1 balun, 
which was to have fed the LW, had to be rapidly "converted" into an 
additional power filter.  Not pretty but it worked, and just in time . . .

73, Peter G3LET

peter.jackson17 at ntlworld.com wrote:

>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
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