I know this is a little bit late considering SSB Field day was nearly 2 weeks ago, but it’s been a busy few weeks so blogging had to take a back seat! This year I took part in SSB Field day with the Oxford & DARS, like normal from the site at Horspath which is on the edge of the city close to the BMW Mini factory.

Setup went to plan and we had the Force12 C31XR, 40/80m Dipoles and the RX station vertical setup along with K3s, Yaesu Quadra Linear and the computers ready to go before the kick off, what we wasn’t expecting was the poor conditions. It was nearly impossible to get any sort of run on 20/15/10m and lots of the stations in the All Asian contest flatly refused to work us and sometimes in a pretty rude manor (Think they need to chill out a bit?).

Never the less we plodded on and worked what we could. After fish/sausages/chips for dinner, conditions seemed to start to pickup and I managed to get a few small runs to North America then about 11pm till 1am managed a big pile up to the States which was good fun and boosted callsigns in the logbook no end.

40m was also a pretty decent band through the night but we had problems on 80m due to lots of static crashes. This always seemed to happen around the time of the other station giving the serial number which got very frustrating.

Sun rise soon appeared Sunday morning and after working a bit of DX on 40m we shifted back to 20m to be greeted with a reasonable pile up for a while, then rest was spent calling CQ and working multipliers which the Spotting station was passing across. One problem I did find was due to vision being a bit poor sometimes missed the “spots” showing on the logbook!

Like normal soon as the contest was due to finish the heavens decided to open, but thankfully by the time it got to taking the tents down they’d nearly dried off which was lucky. We ended up at the end of the contest with about 1102 QSOs including dupes, and we’ve got plenty of ideas on how to improve the score next year.