It turns out that Wales is quite sunny actually.

I have been told that to go portable is the way to do well in the contests by going to a square that is not heavily populated. I used to go paragliding to Wales so looked for somewhere over there to the west for a site. Google maps, again, is your friend here.

I drove down on Tuesday morning and it takes about 3.5-4 hours but nice M4 and no holdups.

The site is stunning (in the sun) with great take off’s in all directions apart from directly west where there is an MOD set of masts which I am told can cause interference on some bands.

I set up and immediately had a couple of QSO’s with Italy showing that there was some lift. However in the 2 hours before the contest i had hardly anyone, except some very helpful local operators coming back to me.




Just as the contest started at 8.30pm i had a response from Latvia and he was my first of 20 or so european contacts . All handled as quickly as possible because of the sporadic nature of the propagation.



I worked around 60 stations in total but a good number of multipliers and most at reasonable distances. Night fell after a chat with some after the contest for a wrap up, with a great sunset and moon to send me to sleep in the back of the car.




After getting up at 5.30 I was back, after packing up the mast, at 10.30am at the home QTH. Having stopped for some photos on the way down the mountain.





Surprisingly the scores from the 60 contacts were much better than I had thought - primarily because I am not sure how the scoring works!.







All from a hill in Wales.

I feel like I have had a holiday….but have only been away for a day!

The weekend saw a combined 6m 24 hour contest and drinking competition sponsored by Uri and his whiskey collection.

The contest was great , sporadic “E” conditions which saw us getting to Iceland and further. The mast trailer worked a treat but we need to work on the compressor to get it to go up more slowly!



It also gave me the chance to try the new mast setup and the 6m G0KSC Yagi before the UKAC on Tuesday.

Great second trip in two days to ML&S.

This time to take the sick c7000 in which is suffering from the same problem it had 6 months ago finals or pre driver failure.

Luckily the nice chaps from icom were there and have taken it in to have a good look at. My thoughts are that there might also be a problem with the fan which means it is just overheating and then killing the transistors. But what do I know.

And doubly good news, I got a celebratory T shirt as well to go with my burger.

It nearly made the M25 worthwhile.

Spent the first hour with the mast down and then braved the wind

More multipliers but still suffering from shorter distance qso’s as opposed to being in a non IO91 location

After the seals were done on the club mast I brought it home to scratch mu head about fitting it to the trailer.
It seems that there are a number of different variants of the Scam mast and our looks different to the one that G1NGE had in his photos.

The question was how do you manhandle the massively heavy mast into the exact position that you need and after one failed attempt I resorted to good old ratchet straps and wedges.



Then i turned down the bolts so that they would go into two holes drilled into the frame to pivot the mast. I used a centre drill to centre the hole in the threaded section to avoid damaging the threads and then opened it up to 9.5mm



i thought it important to set the mast vertical before drilling the holes seeing as that is where we want it to end up



The rest just involved grinding the backets to get them to fit




Here it is done. Just needing some painting and the cover plates fitting.