This weekend was the phone portion of the Oceania DX contest.
VK3FAWB, VK3AJ and myself set up an HF station at the Gilwell Park Scout Camp on Saturday and worked the contest as VK3SAT.
Unlike previous years we elected this year to work the contest from a building rather than tents and what better place then Cleve Cole hut. We arrived about 4 pm and set about setting some extra antennas.
A 40m 1/4 vertical with many radials was set up in the clearing to the south of the hut, a 40m inverted Vee facing north/south at about 15 metres AGL was set on the north side of the hut and a 160m dipole facing east/west, at about 10m AGL was run from the tower. Having additional antennas in place allowed us to establish 3 working positions inside.
- Position 1: 10m, 15m and 20m on the existing yagi
- Position 2: 40m on a temporary 1/4 vertical and inverted Vee
- Position 3: 80m and 160m on existing 80m dipole and temporary 160m dipole
Each position had a PC and was running VK Contest Logger as a stand alone application. This simplified log keeping and it took about 10 minutes all up to combine the three station logs into one log for submission.
Propagation in VK was low and many stations reported things were quieter than previous years.
We found this as well with very few contacts in the late evening and until about 2 hours after sunrise this morning.
We made contacts on all bands except 10m and logged over 150 contacts. Our claimed score is more than 60,000 points, over 5,000 points better than our tent based effort last year.
Where that will place us remains to be seen.
73