Background:
My shack had been stripped down and packed into filing cabinet drawers nearly a year ago due to ‘local circumstances’, but with the encouragement of the Station Manager (from her generally horizontally polarised position!), I scrabbled together a temporary station upstairs at home and spent some time just having fun playing a bit of radio – interleaved within our daily routine.
The Station:
The station comprised an IC7000 (with grab ‘n gab mic!) and a small SMPSU providing the ‘juice’. The IC7000 fed a Z11 Pro ATU and from there, by coax swapping, either to a dog-leg wire dipole, resonant on 80 metres (but just 20 feet high!) or to my Fritzel tri-bander at about 30 feet.
Power from the rig was just under 100 watts, but my location in the house was about as far as you can get from the aerials, so I had to set up new cabling, strung around the house to where they were needed. I think my cables were as long as in one of our ‘real’ IOTA setups at the farm!! Though fed with 213, there will have been losses !!!!!! I really should repair my linear !!
Aim:
I had two targets – apart from having fun –
i) …to set up a workable station from scratch in an unfamiliar location (sounds rather like a real IOTA!)
ii) …to see how many island stations I could work just using “hunt & pounce” – no calling ‘CQ’.
Results:
I worked exactly 80 island stations over the weekend.
Most were worked on 15 metres, just a few less on 20 and very few on 10 metres (-Sunday morning and Saturday tea-time).
I worked just six stations on 80 metres (all were local Europe!) – at about 1 am on Sunday, and finally just LA, EF and SP on 40 metres using the 80m dogleg and the Z11 – during the same late night session.
Points are not important but here is the list of countries/islands worked…
Oceania:
- Indonesia OC21
Asia:
- Cyprus AS4
- Japan AS7
- Turkey AS159
South America:
- Argentina SA8
- Aruba SA36
- Brazil SA46
North America:
- Cuba NA15
- Guadeloupe NA102
- Martinique NA107
- Nova Scotia NA81
- Prince Edward Isl NA29
- St Barthelemy NA146
- St Kitts & Nevis NA104
- St Paul Island NA 94
- St Pierre & Miquelon NA32
- USA NA31, 110, 137
Africa:
- Canaries AF4
- Madeira AF14
Europe:
- Azores EU175
- Corsica EU14
- Croatia EU16, 126, 170
- Dodecanese EU1
- Eire EU115, 121
- England EU5 (Tnx Tony LDL!)
- Estonia EU34
- European Russia EU182
- Finland EU2, 96, 140
- France EU70
- Germany EU57, 129
- Guernsey EU114
- Holland EU38, 146
- Italy EU31, 144
- Norway EU36
- Poland EU132
- Portugal EU40
- Sardinia EU24
- Scotland EU9, 123
- Sicily EU25
- Ukraine EU179
Evaluation:
Not a huge haul (-several stations with 2000+ in the log on Sunday were double checking my serial when I gave them 70-something!) – but the low QSO total was more to do with the amount of time I spent rattling the ether and with my insistence on only working Island stations on S&P.
However, I was pleasantly surprised that almost everything worked.
I was particularly pleased with the IC7000. It certainly punched above its weight on TX, blasting through some pile ups when I hadn’t expected an early reply.
The RX filtering was also impressive compared to my FT920.
The only disappointment was my own memory… I had to set up a new laptop installation of DXLAB for logging, but I ended up logging on paper (!!!!!!) because I couldn’t recollect on which screen the tick box was that told DXKeeper to increment QSO serial numbers !!!!
However, the main outcome was: “I had fun”!
It also has to be said that this was the fastest ever clear-up after an IOTA contest… Two switches to ‘off’, disconnect the aerial & take my coffee cup downstairs !!!
When’s the next contest? !!
73 es gud dx
Den