Contest News

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SSB Field Day 2009 - Report

Graham G4FNL who ran the event, writes the following report on the WADARC Mailing list.

Thanks to the people that got involved in the lead up to, and actually during the weekend, to make SSB Field Day a successful club activity. I really don't want to hand out individual plaudits to anyone for a special mention, because that would be unfair. Rest assured that we really benefited from your involvement - in whatever capacity. From my own perspective, in the early planning stages, my main concern was whether we would get the support from the wider club membership. I needn't have worried - we did, and my sincere thanks to you if you came along and got involved. If you didn't - well never mind - but perhaps if you get talking to others at the club, you might see what you missed.....

As John G8FMJ has mentioned, we were very lucky with the weather - no rain at all, which is rare for SSB Field Day! We had a lot of new equipment that was acquired and organised in readiness for the weekend: A huge operating tent; two headsets; an ingenious connection box, and real-time computer logging to name but four. The weekend wasn't exactly trouble-free: we had problems with the generator (it ran out of oil - and cut out); we had problems with RF getting into the laptop PC, and also a load of hash coming out of the PC / Screen / PSU etc etc causing receiver QRM. As you'll be aware, it's always a tricky environment to get everything working as it should. Perhaps with a bit more planning - we could have avoided these teething problems. I think that maybe I should add these to a "lesson-learnt" list.....

As far as the statistics from the weekend go, we made 508 QSOs. We had 84 multipliers. According to the logging programme, we have a total score of approx 179,172 points. We may lose a few points for logging errors etc, but based on this score, if we entered this into last years results, we would have come 4th. Clearly, we can't read too much into our raw score - but it gives you some idea of how we did (last year we were 13th with 107,000 points)

Hopefully, over the next week or so, I can check through our log, and correct any silly errors etc, and submit. Once I have done that, I'll send a further update.

I intend to do a more comprehensive write-up for Ragchew magazine, with some pictures from the weekend too. For now, if you got involved and you did something - my grateful thanks.

73 Graham G4FNL

Further to the above, Graham went through the log and found and corrected 4 logging errors, and subsequently submitted the entry. Graham said:

Currently, we are in third position - based on QSO numbers - but of course that isn't the only measure of the score. Our final claimed score = 176,790 points, which was gleaned from 507 real QSOs and 83 multipliers. Just for the record, we worked 42 DXCC countries too!

Keep an eye on the scores as they are submitted at SSB FD Results Page.

The Worthing and District Amateur Radio Club is affiliated to the Radio Society of Great Britain.
The DStar Project was funded by a bequest from G4XRU SK and Awards for All.

Updated - 14/09/2009