VHF NFD 2012
On the 7th/8th July 2012 we operated 2m SSB from A hill near Basingstoke in assistance of Basingstoke ARC.
The Plan was originally to operate 2m and 70cm for the full weekend, with Basingstoke ARC operating 6m and 4m for the contest periods during the day.
Planning Page: Outing:2012/07/07
Short Story
Due to the weather conditions we decided to only set up one station on 2m. There were slight delays due to the bolt-holes in the mast not lining up and the sizing of guys being incorrectly labelled, but apart from that, the setup was without incident.
The Vulcan bomber flew over at low altitude during the morning, on it's way to an appearance at RIAT. Unfortunately we were working on the mast at the time, and none of us had a camera to hand.
Saturday Afternoon/Evening
For the first 3 hours or so we used the Search-And-Pounce technique. Turning the beam a little, scan through the band listening for callsigns, ignoring dupes and contacting new ones, then turn the beam a little more and repeat.
After a while with diminishing returns on the new-contacts/dupes ratio, we were spending a lot of time checking their callsigns, and so our new-contact rate drastically reduced. At this point we chose a free frequency, called 5 or so CQs, moved the beam 10 degrees, another 5 or so CQs and then repeat, swinging through West -> South-East and back. About every hour we'd do another Search-And-Pounce scan, particularly in the East/South-East direction to look for European Stations that had just come on.
The Constant CQs while slowly moving the beam worked very well, although quickly tired out our voices. We therefore used the Voice Keyer most of the time overnight however did not get a single reply from it. An audio report in the early morning told us the transmitted quality was very sub-standard, this will be something to improve on in the future.
Overnight
With most of us wanting sleep overnight, Henry 2E0RPY and Chris M6EUD operated the station overnight, experimenting with SSTV on 20m when the activity on 2m really died off. It was noticeable that several other UK /P stations had their Voice Keyers on automatic, with precise intervals between CQs and that these were unmanned for some of the night - not responding to our replies even with a good signal strength, this problem did not occur at any other point in the contest, in fact people seemed to hear us a lot clearer than we could hear them!
Sunday
Early on the Sunday morning there was a good deal of fog, adding to atmosphere as we beamed out the RF Voice Power into the fog, hoping for other early-risers! A couple of contacts were gained from Ireland at about 6am, the first being off the back of the beam as we tried to contact the 1-hour-ahead Europeans.
Contacts picked up again around 10/11am, and the sun came out! We started packing equipment away, ending up with Chris M6EUD calling CQ CONTEST for the last few minutes, running off a car battery as we packed away everything but the chair he was sitting in. The canvas tent was swiftly packed up in the nick of time, as soon as it was in the back of the car, the sky opened, conveniently rinsing the groundsheet!
Results
We achieved 136 unique QSOs, with a cumulative total of 21,318 km.
One particular QSO of note was DK0ZB at 683km.
More stats will be posted once I have the log file.
Photos
Lessons Learnt
Preparation
- Practice with the voice-recorder and rig before the contest, apparantly it was very quiet.
Check Mast bolt-holes alignment + guy sizing.- Sorted by BARC- Train with Logging Software
Operation
- Start with no extra equipment, power up each piece one-by-one to check for added noise floor.
- e.g. A car laptop charger caused 3 extra S-points for first 18 hours of the contest
- Log '/P' on call signs when given.
- Keep squelch control down.
- Log the frequency (and bearing?) of /P dupes, they are likely to be on the same/similar frequency for the whole 24 hours and this will save time when scanning the band.
Food
- Bring Ketchup, Mayonnaise
For Muddy Conditions
- forget the ground sheet, and use straw-bales instead. This saves constant in/out and shoes on/off.
