The Yeovil Fun Run is a contest organised by the Yeovil Amateur Radio Club and supported by GQRP. It is run in March or April annually preceding the Yeovil convention. In essence it is a QRP contest, though participation is not limited to QRP stations or GQRP members - anybody can take part!
It was announced late in 2006 that the contest would be discontinued following declining support. However Gary Swain 2E0BFJ kindly offered to take over running of the event and ran the 2007 and 2008 events.
Download the rules for the 2008 event here.
This is a very leisurely contest and ideal for getting used to contest exchanges without the hurly-burly of the big contests. Even if you cannot operate for all the sessions you will find it a worthwhile event and the contest committee welcomes newcomers. It would be ideal for foundation and intermediate licence holders who are relatively new to CW on the HF bands. And if you are used to running QRO try turning the power down and entering properly as QRP, you will be surprised what you can work.
The contest takes place annually in March or April - in 2008 the contest took place on the evenings of Monday 31st March through Thursday 3rd April. Each of the four evening sessions lasts two hours from 1900z-2100z. Operation takes place on 40m and 80m CW centred around the QRP frequencies of 7030 and 3560 kHz. Exchange RST and serial number, your power in watts and name. Each QSO with a QRP station (5W or less) scores 10 points, contacts with QRO stations score 3 points.
Each year there are a number of special bonus stations, chosen from last year's entrants. Contacts with these stations score 25 points. In 2008 the bonus stations will be F5VJD,2E0BFJ and GB2LOW (Thursday only). In 2004 I operated as one of the bonus stations.
You can work any station once per band each evening. One quirk of the rules is that your serial number should start at any number greater than 100 of your choosing - this is supposed to take away any element of guessing how the others are doing but confuses logging software. By another quirk, the bonus stations start as normal with 001....
In the 2003 event I won the 40m section and came second on 80m - and second overall. Being a bonus station in 2004 prevented me from getting any awards myself, but I was pleased to give others their bonus points. In 2005 I was in third position.
The 2006 and 2007 events were marred by very poor inter-G propagation on 40m, and although the contest was supported by a number of DL stations who could be worked there, most of the activity was on 80m. Activity also seemed somewhat down on what it had been in previous years, with some regular faces missing.
Using Super Duper by EI5DI in this contest.
More and more amateurs are using computer logging software in contests these days, and it certainly makes life much easier than in the old days when everything had to transcribed by hand after the event. However this contest has slightly unusual rules and does not fall easily into what most contest programs accept. In 2003 and 2004 I had a go and developed a method of using EI5DI's Super Duper in the event. For the past few years I have taken this further and written a short program to easily produce a suitable entry log from Super Duper's output.
The procedure is as follows:
First download the program funrun.zip. Unpack the file using Winzip or similar. The file readme.txt contains more detailed instructions.
Before the contest set up Super Duper as follows:
(set up the contest options manually, ignore the contest template screen and press
Escape to go to manual setup.)
Type 11 General - select G on the options screen
Points per QSO - 10
Mode - CW
You need to start at a serial number greater than 100 but Super Duper by default starts at 001, so why not start at 101 or 201 and stick a little bit of paper on your screen to correct the top digit (as well as reminding you to send the correct number..). This technique worked very well here last year once I had got the paper in the right place.
The free format part of the exchange - serial number received, name and power - will usually fit into the 14 spaces allowed if you omit spaces between fields - i.e. you would have 2333WPETER. If you get a longer name sent which won't fit, put in an appropriate shortened version and jot down the full version on a scrap of paper you are keeping to one side. You will only find you have to do this once or twice. You must use the W as it is used as a marker by the program.
SuperDuper has been updated from version 13.01 to allow up to 14 characters in the exchange field, which should be enough to cope with the longer names. The program has been updated to accomodate this change and will work with all versions of SD later than 13.01 but not with .all files produced from earlier versions.
You are allowed to work stations once per band each night. To stop Super Duper treating these as dupes you can use the command SETDUPE at the start of each session, this will clear the calls from the dupe list and allow you to work them again. Sadly this prevents SD reminding you of the op's name and power when you work him the next night... It also seems that if you scroll up to edit an earlier QSO (even for that day) SETDUPE gets cancelled and it goes back to showing them as dupes - a bug in SD.
When you have finished, locate the .all file generated by SD - the name of this will depend on what name you chose for the contest when you set up SD, and will be eg fr06.all. Run the program funrun.exe. Press a key on the prompt, browse to the .all file and select. You are then prompted for a starting serial number greater than 100 - this will be used to correct the sent serial numbers. If you type in a smaller number you will not be allowed to continue unless you are one of the three bonus stations.
The program runs and generates two files - eg fr06_80.log and fr06_40.log (or whatever you have named your contest) in the same folder as the source file. Exit the program by closing the window.
Examine these files with a text editor, eg Notepad. You will see that it has seperated the logs for each of the days you participated, formatted it into nice columns, and correctly scored and totalled the days according to the power received and whether the station was a bonus one. There is an overall band total. If there are any names you had to shorten to fit during the contest, edit these in manually. Also if you know you have worked duplicates on any day you will need to set these to zero points and recalculate the totals - no duplicate checking is done in my software.
Prepare a cover sheet with all the necessary details, and give a summary of the band and overall totals. The final total, as described in the rules, is based on your two best evening scores on each band.
When you are happy, email the log to Gary 2E0BFJ (email address in the rules), or if you wish print it out and put it in an envelope as we used to do.
Any comments, suggestions, improvements to this method of using Super Duper are most welcome!
Have fun, and I look forward to working you in the contest!
73 Dave G3YMC