By Dave Sergeant G3YMC
Our entry in NFD 2003 follows our successful effort in 2002. My report on NFD 2002 gives a lot of background information and you should read that first if you have not already done.
The rules for this year's event were unchanged from last year. It seemed sensible to try another attempt in the low power section using my Elecraft K2 transceiver and power the complete station again on battery power.
The picture shows the end result, read further for the details.
After our experience last year in fact not much in the way of planning was required. I had had a lot of success with my K2 during the previous twelve months, including a serious entry in several of the major international contests so was now very familiar with how my station worked in contest situations. John G3NCN had similarly now much more experience of his K2.
So the basic station, at least initially, would be identical to last year's - the K2 at 5W battery powered, logging with my ancient laptop powered off the trailer batteries, and the same doublet antenna. We could have operated from the same site, Longhill Park, but for various reasons we decided to have a go from our former site near Winkfield, some five miles from home. Arranging for permission was simply a matter of phoning the owner, a local amateur, who agreed on the spot.
One month before the contest it was necessary to register our entry with the RSGB HF Contests Committee, and e-mail notification was sent. Although registration is no longer compulsory for NFD, it is still necessary to qualify for any trophies and certificates, and of course we wanted those if we won! Registration is also useful in that a list of entrants is distributed before the event and we can see who the competition is in our section.
Last year we used a 30 foot ex-army fibreglass mast to support the antenna. Although this worked well, it took some time to erect and had a few 'fiddly' features. It also really needed three people to safely erect it. John decided it was rather better to use a lightweight aluminium mast he had made, and which we had used for NFD in 2000. John's mast is specifically designed so that it is easy to erect by one person. Since we had very little head load with our doublet this would seem appropriate to our needs and would reduce the time to get on air.
The laptop used last year was an 8086 Zenith with no hard disk. Later versions of EI5DI's Super Duper require a 386 processor or better. I had been using a Toshiba T2000SX 386 laptop for my own station logging. This runs off a 14V battery pack, or 18V mains adaptor, and would appear unsuitable for running off a 12V battery supply. At the last minute I did some tests and found that it would indeed just work at 12V and it was modified with the addition of a chocolate block to connect a battery in place of its internal battery. Tests indicated all would be well to power the laptop, as last year, off the heavy duty battery in John's trailer. With a working system to run the latest version of SD a registered version for G4BRA was ordered and arrived just in time for Field Day.
The low power section of NFD allows a maximum of 12 hours operation out of the total 24 hours of the contest. These may be chosen to be at any time, although any break must be a minimum of 1 hour. Following our technique in 2002 we decided to operate for the first twelve hours which would give us a reasonable amount of daylight operating on the HF bands and the whole of the night period for the lower bands - and allow myself and John to get to Church on the Sunday. We were aware that HF propagation would be well down on last year as we were now on the downward slope of the 11 year sunspot cycle. In particular conditions had been dreadful in the weeks preceding the contest due to the earth being in the path of a solar wind stream from the sun. At one point I had visions of the whole weekend being a radio washout and we had to be prepared to listen to totally dead bands. There may be a sporadic E opening on 10m on the Saturday but we shouldn't count on it and it was important to take full advantage of the double points available on Top Band.
We planned to get on site at around 2pm local time, giving us plenty of time to get the station ready by our intended start time of 5pm local (the actual contest starts at 1500z, or 4pm local time). After a leisurely chat with the owner we proceeded to put the pieces together. First John's camping trailer was transformed into its tent accommodation, followed by uncoiling the antenna and putting the pieces of the mast together. Very soon everything was in place and the K2 unpacked and connected along with the laptop. After tuning up the antenna via the K2's internal automatic tuner and loading the SD software in the laptop all was ready for go. So we kicked off right at the beginning, 1500z. One advantage of these small battery powered stations is that they are very quick to get up and going.
This is a general view of our operating position, with Ian G3TLH on the key and John G3NCN logging. Note the compactness of the station. The rig is powered off a 7AH battery not quite visible behind the K2.
The large box at the rear is my Yaesu SP901 external speaker, and not a power supply as some have suggested. We found in the open air we needed to advance the K2's audio gain pot much further than in my shack, and an external speaker helped. However a far better solution would be for the operators to wear headphones - must investigate that for next time.
We decided on a pattern of operating of two hours logging followed by two hours operating and this seemed to work well with all our three operators getting a reasonable share. With computer logging the paper checklog is really redundant, but there is advantage in having two pairs of ears available to sort out any problems, together with the friendly support which is so much a part of NFD. As it happened there were no real problems.
As predicted, the higher HF bands were quiet and disappointing. Although we did work just a few stations on 10m the band did not really open and it would have been counterproductive to have spent too much time there. Apparently there was an opening on the Sunday morning after we had closed down, but even then nobody was claiming big scores down there. We started with a spell on 20m and found it rather hard going with QRP, but had rather more success on 15m with even a spot of DX in the form of VQ9JC - and first call at that. We heard later that while we were doing that there was a good opening to Germany on 20m, but you can't be everywhere at once.
Later on we moved down to the lower bands and had quite successful results on Top Band, even generating a mini pile up at one time. Static was low and not a problem, and with our scores on 80m and 40m we achieved very reasonable scores on these bands.
Field Day without any hitches would not normally be the rule as we were soon to find out. It had been assumed that the trailer battery, a 65AH or thereabouts car battery, would not let us down and would power the laptop and some lighting no problem for the duration. Wrong! These trailer batteries are charged from the car electrics while the trailer is being towed. This had been the first trip the trailer had made this season and it seems it was not fully charged. Around 2 am the laptop screen suddenly went blank without warning. Realizing what the problem was, John started his car engine to top up the charge - which caused the trailer tent to fill with diesel fumes. So after 15 minutes or so we stopped the car engine, but there was still not enough charge and the laptop failed again around an hour later. Fortunately no QSOs were lost and the log was still safely on the computer hard disk.
Another Murphy glitch was found after I got home. The floppy backup I made of the complete log at the end was corrupt and couldn't be read on my Windows 98 computer - presumably due to low volts on the floppy drive. Fortunately the laptop hard disk copy was still there, phew! I admit this was one aspect of the laptop I had not checked in a low voltage condition, I guess one learns!
Not quite a 'Murphy' but an annoyance was the 'low battery warning' beep of the K2. We thought one 7AH battery would see us through the full 12 hours, and so it probably would have except that the K2 is programmed to warn the operator when the battery volts drops below 11V. Not content with a simple display or flashing annunciation, it does this by sounding a beep every few minutes in the condition. Such a beep was so annoying, even though we knew there was adequate life left in the battery, that we had to switch to our second battery.
Since we had started at 4pm on Saturday afternoon and had not taken any breaks, when 4 o'clock arrived our 12 hours was up and it was time to switch off and dismantle the station. We had been blessed with dry weather for most of the weekend apart from one or two small showers, but on checking the local weather forecast beforehand it showed that rain was due to arrive in Bracknell around 3am. For once they got it right, and virtually on schedule it started to pour down at 3.30. By the time we were ready to go outside it was well and truly wet and taking the station down was not a very pleasant experience. It was also still quite dark, not helped at all by the weather, and it was certainly fiddly undoing knots and things in the grey twilight. Anyway, the station came down fairly easily, was soon packed away, and we were able to leave site just after 5 am - too early to say cheerio to the owner! I arrived home at 5.15 and an immediate change out of my sodden clothes.
Once the small problem of the corrupted floppy disk of the log had been sorted out, the log was soon prepared with the help of SD Check into the Cabrillo format required for log submittal. The results are as follows:
160m 80m 40m 20m 15m 10m Total
Total Valid QSOs: 79 94 69 48 28 5 323
Total Points: 604 366 250 176 115 32 1543
Claimed Score: 1543 points
These scores are slightly down on last year's total, but considering the general lack of good propagation and very little activity on 10m are very satisfactory. We seem however to have lost out on making sufficient QSOs on 20m, clearly not on the band at the right time, and this has degraded our overall score compared with other entrants in the low power section. In fact from initial information submitted by others on the UK Contest e-mail reflector we appear to be likely in second place, and beaten by last year's winner, Echelford ARS with their K2. Of course anything can happen during the log checking process and it is possible someone else may even push us into third place!
This is likely to be the last year Ian G3TLH will be operating on our team, as he is moving to Devon when his company relocates. So we will be short of operators, and may well be looking for assistance for next year's contest. Hopefully we shall be able to put a station on the air though. Whether the sunspots will be favourable remains to be seen, there is another 5-6 years before we start the climb to the next sunspot maximum...
In the published results we are second place again!
73 Dave G3YMC