Last weekend was the RSGB HF Field Day, I joined some friends at the Double X-Ray Pile Up Club i will let Callum M0MCX tell you all about it…….
“M0XXT/P had our second outing to SSB Field Day, running in the open section again with an A3S at 10 meters and a fan dipole for 40/80m at 60 feet with a delta loop for spotting. This year, we used our new 1000 foot ASL Cotswolds
QTH. At the controls we had myself (M0MCX), Lee (G0MTN), James (M3YOM) Tim M0URX) and Terry (G4MKP).”……
After an extremely wet and windy Friday afternoon erecting the tent, all seemed to go smoothly with Terry and Lee running most of Saturday, James and I running the night shift and Terry and Tim taking over the Sunday morning
slots. The only hiccup was the 40/80m dipole feed-point balun shorting out at twilight on Saturday eve due to water. This required the whole mast to come down and an emergency change-over. Ugh! Thanks to James for leading
this which meant us holding 20m longer than planned – but Terry ran an interesting late spurt to the US as a bonus. However the real points were new countries and ideally /P so to get on to 40m and 80m when 20m was
closing brought me some light relief.
Lots of highlights – too many to list but all the usual DX suspect were worked with my favourite ZL/VK popping up on Sunday morning on 40m. Same every year.
Scores were better than last year and we improved our QSO rate by 250 or so.
BAND QSO PTS CTY
80 347 1335 36
40 390 1450 41
20 387 1326 54
15 60 240 15
10 30 114 8
1214 4465 154
Score 687,610
My personal thanks to the team for turning out in such awful weather and then running some great radio – and also all the other stations that made this event such a crazy time!
Few photos this year because the weather was so bloomin awful however I remembered to take a few between storms – see: http://www.m0mcx.
Cheers,
Callum McCormick
Team Captain
Double Xray Firm
