SSB FIELD DAY REPORT:
It was a great weekend with excellent weather (though cold overnight!), a great social atmosphere as well as a serious attitude to the contest. Band conditions were very poor indeed and the hourly contact rate was very slow and only exceeded 50 an hour at the end of the contest.
I hadn’t much hope of a good result until I checked our scores against other groups who have already sent in logs and I’m very pleased to see we haven’t done badly at all! So far we are second in the list of stations entering the Restricted section, with G3WOR/P just above us. They are usually in the top two or three each year so if our log proves to be a good one this year we might stand a chance! The photos above and below shows the SSB FD summary score and the hourly contact rates. In other contests such as IOTA, these are usually double the rate.
This weekend, as usual for SSB FD, we entered the Restricted Section which, under the rules, limited us to 100 watts o/p from an FTDX950 transceiver to a single wire antenna, a 132ft doublet inverted V doublet. Unfortunately we had severe noise problems on 20 and 15m and only found the cause after the contest was over.
Operating in the Restricted Section means stations don’t usually have enough ERP to run pile ups and make loads of contacts. It was interesting to listen to G3TBK/P, in the Open Section, working a pileup of USA stations on 20m. Dave and his team were using 400 watts to a beam antenna. We could barely hear the ones calling him! A good Open Section entry would show well over 1000 QSOs for the 24 hour contest but Restricted Section logs are usually half or less than that.
I doubled checked our log for mistakes this morning and was pleased to find only 5 over the 439 entries had obvious callsign errors. I cannot check the received serial numbers for errors so there may be a few incorrect ones there. However, I believe our overall error rate will be very low. Well done to all the operators!
Many thanks to all who helped and to those who came up to visit us or contact us over the air, on HF or on 144MHz.
A special thanks to Mike G0NEY and John G4LKD, of the 93 Contest Group, who once again joined forces with us to put on a G5TO/P station for the 144MHz Trophy Contest which ran in parallel to HF SSB Field Day. Co-operation like this is very nice indeed. A report on that contest will appear in due course.
You can check the SSB FD logs at: http://www.rsgbcc.org/cgi-bin/hfposted.pl?Contest=SSB+Field+Day&year=2015
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