Daniel has sent his report on the weekend.

G2XV/P's entry in the 144MHz Trophy was one of the club highlights of this year's contest season. The weather was perfect, the propagation conditions were good, and the contest was a great team effort. We had a dozen or so club members and guests at the microphone, and more operators for the logging and the antennas.

Apart from having to swap transceivers in mid-contest twice, all equipment worked for the whole 24 hours. It was good to know that we were putting out a nice clean signal, which was reported throughout the contest. The overhauled Big Linear, commonly referred to as "The Beast MkII", worked flawlessly. It was impressive just how rugged it is against the usual field day misuse, like a hot-swap of the generator or working into an open circuit (maybe the most elaborate cigar lighter :-) According to our online guest book, some other contesters got jealous - and that even before the event. They have all reason to: Not many stations had a signal as clean as ours during the event. This linear is clearly up for QRO contests.

The HF Experimenting Day (or HF Play Day, for short) was good fun. Making use of the infrastructure of the VHF contest and the fantastic weather, we had 4 stations up, all running low power, and six operators who had a go.

We had all sorts of portable antennas, like car whips, inverted Vs and random wires. Really impressive was Gerald G0HEM's magnetic loop, which was only about one S-point down compared to a Nearly Half Wave End Fed Dipole (or "Fuchs" for short). The ongoing HF contest was a nice opportunity to do A/B comparisons. It was also good fun to give away some points.

Having found my new licence in the letter box on that very morning, I used the opportunity to try the new callsign on the apparently dead 18MHz band (using 20W SSB). The first station who answered me was Rafi 4X4FR from Port Ashdod in Israel, followed by Dave 9H5DH on Malta Island. What a nice start!

Congratulations to Elizabeth and Daniel on attaining their full licences

Now a report on his activities during the weekend by John Smith G4KJJ passed on by John and Elizabeth.

Arriving at 0810 on the VHF Field day site in anticipation of a bacon sandwich I began to install myself and my station some 100 m from the main event.  By 0850 I was on air with a Dutch station near Rotterdam who gave me 579 report confirming my 4W and 6.5m high inverted vee for 40m was working.  It was a fine sunny day and my sun/wind shelter gave sufficient protection.  Next was the bacon sandwich and cup of tea.

Two hours later, after chatting to other visitors to the site who had to pass my station to get to the "main event", during which I consumed more tea and cake, I set about operating again. I had two more good QSOs with best dx to Bern. At 1600 I was happy, packed and ready to go home.  My stn was: MFJ 9049, self supporting 6.5m mast, inverted vee ant., 7 a/hr battery, straight key, Gaz burner, pack of buns and bacon, teapot and tea kit and some cake.  ( I tested this cake...yummie!.....JB.)

Good day and good company....John, Smith, G4KJJ,...QRP nr 927.

And so to the contest.   You can see from the photos that we had another very well attended weekend with many visitors and some faces from the past.  It was like old times, by that I mean the middle eighties, with Nick Ash (G6ASH) and Hamish (G0GLJ).   It was also great to see some young faces too.

Mike Rheinus dropped by, also two visitors from the Cambridge University Wireless Society, Martin and Michael.  Gerald brought his H.F. Loop and Brian Wilson was again caught rag chewing with Mike Newport.  Although Graham has moved away this year he still joined us, thank you Graham, next year please remember the computer.   We made contact with Martin and Janet Cranage, with Martin keeping a check throughout the weekend on our signal quality.

Much of the success was down to Elizabeth and Daniel's printed operating schedules and chalk board.  As a result of this many more people "had a go" and very much enjoyed the experience.  Perhaps the logging may have suffered a bit but we must bring new people on.

I am pleased to write that the Linear was flawless and put out a really high class signal with the legal limit at the aerials, which were 1 x 17 ele. Tonna and 2 x 9 ele. stacked Tonna switched.

Thanks to Ian and Mike for the generators and to Mark's friend Graham for the 4 x 4 to tow the trailer.

We have done really well and this was a another great club weekend.  You can follow the progress of our entry on the:

RSGB Contest Committee

Next year we need the cluster, data people.