[WWYC] Hi Lids!

[Gerard Lynch]

Hi Lids,

thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce myself to you all.  My
name is Gerry Lynch and I hold the callsign G0RTN (originially GI0RTN but I
moved to England four years ago, and they're really the same callsign if you
see what I mean).  This is my only callisign and I've held it since I was
first licensed in 1992.  My first ever contest was using someone else's
station in the Scandinavian SSB contest in 1991.  Makes me feel like a real
OM now!!!  I'm 27 years old so have a few more years in WWYC.

While I very much enjoy contesting, I've only sporadically been on the bands
since I was first licensed.  I couldn't afford anything except a very old
FT200 when I was first licensed, and it wasn't up to contesting, especially
on CW, and at the same time my club closed down, there were no others
anywhere near where I lived and no-one seemed very interested in contesting
in GI then anyway.  In 1996, however, I got a second hand FT757GX and was
active in all the main CW contests and a little bit on SSB as well, with
just 100W and a vertical made out of a CB aerial.  Then in 2000 I moved to
London and was living in shared houses with no possibility of putting up
ants, and was QRT until September when I got back on the air again.  At the
moment I'm just dropping a wire out of my window at night when the
neighbours can't see, and am mostly active on 40 metres about 2300-0100Z,
but I hope to get on the roof of the flats soon to put up a dipole.  This
is, of course, not allowed, but I live on the top (9th) floor anyway so I
hope I can make the feeder and the antenns itself fairly unobtrusive.  With
any luck I should be on the air for CQ WW CW but I'm not counting on it.  So
if any nice multi-operator station in the South East of England (or maybe
even further afield - ON or F are possibilities from here!!!) wants to offer
me some operating time, I'd be delighted to help.  I'm a little out of
contest practice but love CW and have been working on recovering my QRQ
skills.

At the weekend I operated as part of the M2W M/S team, my first reasonably
serious effort at a contest since CQ WW CW in 1998.  We had very poor ants
as our M/M plans fell through at the last minute - a triband minibeam, a
G5RV and a longwire for 160 0 the conditions on 10 were great and we made
about 1.3M points.  Not great I know,  but not bad as we made less than 100
QSOs on horrible 40SSB and more QSOs on 80 than on 20.  Some lovely runs
into W/VE on 10 metres and more PY and especially LU stations than I can
even remember in a contest.

This was also (I kid you not) my first experience of computer logging.  N1MM
is fantastic, so easy to use!  I was really worried about this before the
contest but really shouldn't have been.

Apart from all this I like practising my language skills - I speak fluent
German and pretty good Turkish.  I can also get by in French,

73 es CU all on the bands...

Gerry G0RTN/GI0RTN