M2W – IOTA 2012

Our yearly ritual of trekking down to the South Coast for the IOTA contest was once more a huge triumph for the club and we would once more like to thank Kevin G1KAW for organizing this.

As with previous years operations the station consisted of two ICOM IC756PRO III’s together with a 10-15-20M 3 element beam and our monster multi band beam a Mosley Pro 57B with 40m add-on shown in this photograph, was hand turned which was an effort during the night!   Adding to this were 40m and 80m verticals. Kevin G1KAW, Toby 2E0TBO, Garo G0PZA Colin 2E0NOC, Grahame M6GAN, Colin M0DMJ and Jack, our resident SWL, erected all the antennas for the weekend, on the Friday, ready for IOTA on the Saturday.

Undertaking such contests, there are always happy memories and this year there were two highlights one unexpected with Colin M0DMJ and Jack dishing up the biggest BBQ the club has ever seen for a number of years and the second  unexpected was a old friend of the club calling in on 20m Vlad, UA9FAR.  It was a shame that we never had the opportunity to chat with Vlad, but with a bit of luck, we will catch up with him on a Friday club evening when using our club call GX0MIN.

Jonathan G8GD had quite a week before the contest having taken part in ‘Follow the Torch’ GX4WAB an Olympic station based in Hampton West London.  Jonathan G8GD has also added a selection of photos within our Yahoo group. Although they are reduced in resolution from the originals they do show how the weekend went.

Toby 2E0TBO is a member of the Project Echo 2O12L Olympic station in the Royal Borough of Greenwich as the IT Manager, who spent the earlier part of the week assembling antennas, setting up the IT network and spent the first night working the world when the station started.  He still found the time to join us on Friday and not only erected antennas, he also took two four-hour SSB shifts.  Thank you Toby.

If you are a member of another contest club who took part in IOTA, and you are therefore interested then you will be asking yourself ‘so how did they get on?’  We operated on both CW and SSB using 3,5, 7, 14, 21, and 28megs.  If Colin has done his sums correctly then our score for the weekend should be in the region of 5.2 Million points, some 44% up on last year (thank you IOTA for changing the scoring system!)  We found the band conditions generally hard going at times resulting in falling back onto CW, which consisted of about 50% of our total QSO’s mainly due to G0PZA!

If you did make contact with M2W over the weekend or within past HF contests and you would like to ‘double check’ that we have logged you correctly then we have a log book facility in ‘Log Search’  (see the above drop down link) just type in your call and it will list the times you have been logged.  We also have similar logs for our other club call signs.

Our contest team this year was Kevin G1KAW, Toby 2E0TBO, Garo G0PZA, Tony G4KLF, Colin M0DMJ, Colin (2) 2E0NOC, Grahame M6GAN, David G0MRF, Jonathan G8GD and Ian G0OFN.

QSL cards are via the RSGB or Eqsl, LOTW, HRD Lognet and Clublog.

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