160 meter Club Calls AFS Contest

I must confess that I only venture onto top band very rarely. The problem is one of a suitable antenna. Last year I made a shortened Dipole (100 feet total length) with a fairly hefty Inductance coils in the centre of each leg. It does work quite well but it has a very narrow bandwidth. Even with my little LDG AT100Pro autotuner I can only work about 30 Hz of the band without going outside, lowering the ends and folding over some length of the wire. It is supported in the centre at 10 meters agl and the ends slope down to 3 meters agl. I only have room for the one antenna so it has to replace the 80/40 trap dipole.

In the run up to the Contest I did play around with a 9:1 UnUn, end feeding a 60 feet piece of wire but it was no better and much noisier than my shortened dipole so did not finish it.

This year I decided to try and find a run frequency and call CQ and see what developed. This is normally quite a difficult thing to do in HF Contests as the QRM can be severe. Fortunately the power limit is a modest 32 watts on 160 meters so I wasn't bothered by powerful adjacent stations very much at all.

I was using N1MM to log the contest but discovered a scoring problem with it. Working an RSGB HQ station is supposed to attract a bonus of 50 points but N1MM only scored it as a normal Club station with an extra 25 points. With no way of editing the score on the required Cabrillo file I just noted the problem in the soapbox and hoped for the best.

The first 5 minutes of the Contest were very slow and I was beginning to wonder if my antenna was working at all. But things soon warmed up and I received some nice reports. Of course, all reports on HF Contests are 59 but I did get some favourable comments on my signal and audio which was very satisfying.

I finished with a total of 74 QSO's and a grand total of 1102 points (I think!). A huge improvement on previous years.

It was great to work the SDARS Club Station, GX4DSP and also fellow Club members; M1MHZ, M1CDL and G4ODA who all managed to find me in the mellay. 

I must confess that I will be pleased to get the 80/40 meter dipole back up but there is another top band contest next week using CW so I will be retuning the shortened dipole to the lower end of the band so that I can have a go at that. Then it will be back to normal operations again with the pipe and slippers put into storage until next year.

Thanks to all stations for points and I hope that you all enjoyed the Contest.

73 de Jim G0HGH.