Its been sometime since I took part in a single side band field day probably about 3 years due to other commitments, but this year I took part with the Oxford Club using the callsign G8PX/P once used by an ex club member.
We setup the station on Friday afternoon antennas we had to use were
- Cushcraft A4S at 60ft
- 80m/40m Inverted V dipoles at 57ft
- 80m/20m dipoles for spotting station.
As we don’t like leaving the antennas unattended it was decided that myself and my dad (M3JFM) would stay over night, to make sure someone was with the tents and antennas just in case anything was to go wrong.
Saturday was soon to arrive and the main station equipment was setup and tested this was
- Kenwood TS870S
- Yaesu FL2000B Amp
- Kenwood Receiver
- 2 Laptops
- 2 TFT screens
- Vodafone GPRS for cluster access
- UPS (in case we lost power)
Just to make sure everything was working I was allowed to work some of the All Asia contest using the other club callsign G5LO/P and worked about 20 JA stations just before field day started.
Me operating as G8PX/P
During FD conditions did seem rather rubbish at the best of times 20m/15m really didn’t produce many runs although we did manage to work V55O/P on 15m, we soon moved to 40m a couple of hours into the contest and this did help us work our first 100 qsos.
Barry (G4AZN)
Later on in the night 20m opened up for a couple of hours and we were able to work some stateside stations which provided us with a good number of qsos for the log. During the night operating was Barry (G4AZN), Paul (M3JFM) and myself in till 7am when G4FON & M3MLG (M0???) arrived.
Overall the weekend was really great and I personally had a really great time operating during the day and night when it was my spots, although the weather really wasn’t in are favour a lot of the time with heavy rain and winds we still managed to make qsos and nothing got damaged.