The team made 316 QSOs in the 1st round of the 2022 YOTA Contest. Conditions weren’t great during the day and there were very few contest stations on 40m. Most QSOs were made on 20m.
The first shift was Dan M0WUT and Daniel M0TKU.
Then Edwin M0RNN:
Then Charlie M0ZCJ and Nicholas M0NHC.
Mark M0UBS.
And guest op Henry-James M7HJR.
A team of 15 operators including 2 undergraduates, 11 alumni of various vintages, and 2 guests operated M4A in the multi-op single-transmitter category over the last weekend in October. Conditions were excellent with worldwide propagation up to 10m. Approximately 3500 contacts were made for a score of just under 4M points.
CUWS entered the major CQWW SSB contest last weekend (26/27 October) in the Multi-operator, Single Transmitter, category. In practice this means two transmitting positions – but one is designated as only being able to contact countries or “zones” that have not yet been contacted on a particular band. The usual 3 element SteppIR Yagi was supplemented with a 5 element 15m Yagi on a 12m SCAM mast, a 4-square phased array for 40m, and a single quarter wave vertical for 80m. The last two antenna systems will be in place for members to use until the end of March (if the vertical parts survive the winter gales).
Conditions were as poor as one would expect at the bottom of the sunspot cycle but we managed 2802 contacts over the 48 hours and are hoping for 1st place in our category again.
Operators included a number of students and recent alumni.
This year, the weekend of 24/5 November saw the CQWW CW contest. Although CUWS normally enters the SSB version only, my Morse has been progressing steadily and I felt finally ready for a contest…what better opportunity? Since the VP2MUW team of experienced CW ops was returning hours before the contest began, and since in any case I thought building a team to disappoint with my beginner’s operating was a bad idea, I entered the single-operator category from Woop Woop 3. As a relatively recent licensee, receiving my M0 call in early 2017, I was also eligible for the ‘Rookie’ overlay category. Having set up WinTest for the contest in advance and checking I knew at least vaguely how to drive the shack’s Winkeyer, I left things until Friday; unfortunately, I still had rather a lot of work to do over the weekend, so clearly could not go in for a serious 30+hour stint. I elected to aim for about 10-12 hours operating over the weekend, and chose to enter the 20m QRO class.
I arrived at the shack (later than I would have liked) at around 0845 on Saturday, and began by working the numerous multipliers in Asia before propagation in that direction died; after a couple of hours including my first attempt at running in a contest (at 26wpm or so, extremely leisurely by contrast to some ops—TI7W, for example was running at 43wpm), I decided to go and buy myself a sandwich lunch while waiting for the US path to open properly. On my return, I had a cup of tea and got back to work, soon managing a reasonable run of US stations interrupted only occasionally by frequency-snatchers, only some of whom were warned off with an insistent “QRL QRL”!
I returned at greyline time on Sunday morning to work a few more mults/JAs; in the former I was largely unsuccessful, finding no new zones but a few new countries, but I managed to run through around 50 stations, comprised of many Russian/eastern European stations and a few calls from further afield, including JA.
What I did
What was good
What was bad
Raw score was 139,050, though I am sure the error rate will be startlingly high (for reasons outlined above). Hopefully I should at least finish with a positive score! Raw score places me 78/145 worldwide, 59/88 in EU and 6/6 in G.
Update: Final score after moderation was 118,104. 5.4% error rate compared to the average of 2.8%; not brilliant, but not as bad as I’d expected! 1st of 3 in G “Rookie QRO 20m single op”—perhaps unsurprisingly—and 11 of 71 in worldwide Rookie QRO (all sub categories). Not as bad as feared!
M0WJE CQWW certificate
GP6UW certificate
William Eustace M0WJE and Dan McGraw M0WUT entered the 2018 RSGB IOTA Contest from Guernsey. This was no cushy operation, however; the excitement began with the journey from the South Coast, made in a 24′ sailing yacht Aphrodite.
I had brought the boat to Poole to allow a better slant on the anticipated SW winds; Dan and the non-radio operator (but keen sailor) Hugo Cheema-Grubb appeared on the quayside at varying times on the evening of 25 July, and all hands turned in—after figuring out how to stow themselves, a tent, a trestle table, two radios, four or five SOTA poles, power supplies, laptops, camping stools, Morse keys and all the other equipment required for a multi-two station in a very small space!
Under sail off Old Harry Rocks at sunrise, shortly after leaving Poole.
We slipped lines at 0330 and found ourselves off Old Harry Rocks by dawn. The crossing was in beautiful weather but much of it with remarkably little wind, so the deafening roar of the 4hp 2 stroke outboard featured for some hours, and those sitting in the cockpit donned their ear defenders. That evening, Aphrodite arrived at Braye, Alderney—thanks to a tidal miscalculation, just after sunset. After a leisurely breakfast the next morning, the tide was just turning in “the Swinge”, the mildly terrifying gap between Alderney and the off-lying islets, as we set sail once again. The wind was more obliging today, though predictably on the nose, and, helped by the notoriously rapid Channel Islands tides, we reached Guernsey largely under sail.
Beaucette Marina’s boatyard was the operating location chosen, and, when the skipper had recovered from the excitement of the very narrow entrance, the QTH was surveyed: a majestic spot on the cliffs of Guernsey, looking out towards Herm and Alderney. The take-off to Europe was undeniably good, and proximity to salt water combined with ample space for antennas and the operating tent appeared promising. The weather forecast for the contest weekend, with winds frequently up to gale force and the occasional bit of heavy rain on Sunday, filled us with less enthusiasm—though at least it assured us that the conditions would not risk our feeling unadventurous.
Starting at 0700 on contest day 1, Saturday 28th, we began pushing the gear in trolleys up the steep pontoon ramp and then heaving it up the mud bank onto the cliff. This seemed minimal in difficulty then; by the next morning it was to assume quite a different complexion. The tent was erected in the rising winds, and well guyed; with the help of Paul GU4YBW and Adam MU0WLV, we raised our 20m and 15m antennas, set up the trestle table and equipment within the tent, and, at 1300 (the start of the contest) were [almost!] ready to begin operating.
At the start of the contest exactly, Dan, the CW op, began sending the first of many “CQ TEST”s; as the SSB op, I tried to ensure that the frequency and mode were logged correctly (attempts to get the FT890 to speak to DXLog had failed), then began bellowing into the aether, with spectacularly little result. The “statistics” window grew progressively more depressing from my side, as the CW QSO count mounted rapidly in the marginal conditions. After some time, the SSB rate needle lethargically levered itself away from the stop, but not by much. Dan meanwhile was running at a fine rate, occasionally clasping his hands over his earphones in an attempt to resolve an indistinct number or callsign—and perhaps in the hope of reducing the audio frequency power output of his fellow contester across the tent. Hugo had spent the day exploring the island, and helpfully provided a much-needed and delightful dinner. We abandoned the cliffs for an hour or so to eat, washing down the food with the local Roquette cider that Adam (MU0WLV) had thoughtfully delivered as “contest juice”—or Roquette fuel, as he termed it! Dan, complaining that there were “lots of dots and dashes going round and round in my head, and they all hurt”, made the sensible decisions to retire until 0600 the next morning, given the entry appeared to stand little chance of being competitive; I, being more foolhardy, returned to my three-legged stool and continued shouting into the void. Special thanks to the cheering QSOs with Bernie, W3UR, who worked us on SSB on a couple of band slots—the latter at roughly 0400 LT, in which he presciently asked how the tent was coping with the gale force winds. As it banged, flapped and slatted around my ears, I assured him all was well; as the sun began to stain the sky I made a foray outside to re-erect a partly collapsed antenna, but was pleased to note there were no other casualties. Despite running for at least six hours more, conditions (between local QRM from boat battery chargers, QRN, and generally poor propagation) were hard and 100W of voice went nowhere—I was now, finally, creeping up on Dan’s QSO count from the previous day. At about 0430 it began to rain outside, which presented little bother; unfortunately by 0530 it had begun to rain inside the tent as well, and operating became somewhat more challenging. By 0555 the situation had worsened to the point of being hazardous, and, covering all the equipment with oilskins, I QRX-d just as Dan arrived for the morning shift. Fetching more oilskins and packing away the most valuable equipment, operating resumed for a time, now on one rig only; I was pleased to note that Dan grimaced at the conditions on SSB, suggesting it wasn’t only my inadequacy causing such a pathetic rate, and, as the leaks intensified and a lake on the groundsheet developed alarmingly close to the mains wiring, we decided to go QRT for the contest (at risk of going QRT for good!), on 742 QSOs, mostly on 40, 20, and 15m, with a few on 80m—though I had not bothered to erect the 80m dipole, the FT890’s tuner was quite able to cope with the 40m vertical on 80m, though of course the antenna was doubtless rather inefficient.
As the rain poured into the tent, equipment was covered with oilskins and we scaled back to one SSB station.
What, one might ask, of the other crew? Hugo had intended to explore the island that morning. A first hand account from Dan reveals that he rolled over at 0600, silenced his alarm, heard the rain on the cabin roof, remarked “No” and went back to sleep! All hands were soon rallied, though, and the equipment was vacated first to the (mercifully dry) campsite laundry room, then to the boat. After a refreshing few hundred yards’ stroll to admire a cliff fort and pass the time to 0900, we repaired to the restaurant, which had just opened, and had a well-earned Full English breakfast; that evening, the rain having abated, we were treated to a tour of a few of Guernsey’s highlights as unearthed by Hugo’s exploration, before patronising an excellent curry house in St Sampson—virtually the only restaurant in the area open on a Sunday evening.
The accursed tent was stowed in the marina skip, and we set off for Alderney. From here, passage back to the UK was smooth and thankfully uneventful, though crossing the shipping lanes mid-Channel—likened by one watcher of an online AIS display to crawling across the M25—proved entertaining as always. I dozed down below for a while, and in my absence a log entry reports “Playing Frogger with container ships.” We dropped anchor off Sandown, Isle of Wight at 0330 on 1 August, and pottered into Aphrodite‘s home port in Chichester Harbour later that morning, after some much needed sleep!
Rigs were a Yaesu FT890 (kindly loaned by G3ZAY), and Dan’s Elecraft K3, used with paddle and Winkeyer.
The crew had an afternoon ashore in Alderney to walk round some of the island. From left, M0WUT, Hugo Cheema-Grubb, M0WJE.
2018 GP6UW QSL Card
William Eustace, 23/9/18
Martin G3ZAY has produced an updated version of the instructions for using the towers at the shack – please make sure you are familiar with them AND have received personal instruction from him or Michael G7VJR before attempting to make any adjustments.
The following is the latest list of contests in which the callsign M4A may be used, as issued by Ofcom on 18 December 2007 in the G6UW NoV. M4A may only be used by members of the club.
CUWS entered the 2007 CQ World Wide SSB Contest at the end of October and improved on last year’s performance. The pre-contest briefing and final write-up are now available for download.
For some years now, whilst CUWS has been regularly fielding teams for the major phone contests in the amateur radio contesting calendar, there has been little representation in CW contests. This is regarded as a shame by some but it also gives an opportunity to those who are active on the CW parts of the bands to use the G6UW shack both for some contesting practice and to give their own callsigns a QRO airing and to try and nab a few new ones for their country totals.
CQWW CW is generally regarded as the biggest CW contest of the year and there are many expeditions to rare and semi-rare countries all over the world. Often, these expeditions involve taking large antennas and amplifiers to these countries making them easy pickings when combined with G6UW’s large antennas. After some negotiations with other CUWS members keen to have a go in the 2006 contest, it was decided that I should have the Saturday to work what I could.
The original intention had been to travel up on the Friday night and be ready for the start of the contest. It became clear in the week leading up to the contest that this would not be feasible as work committments meant that an arrival in Cambridge would not be possible before 2100 and an 80m antenna would have to be set up in the dark as there is no permanent one currently at the shack. Taking this into account, I decided that it was best to get a good night’s sleep at home on the Friday then head up the next morning. Waking the next morning, I discovered that there was a serious accident on the route to Cambridge I normally use. I waited a little for this to clear then headed north.
The shack is pretty well set up for getting on the air with win-test and the rig interfaces permanently ready. In addition to this, I had use of a microham microkeyer to provide keying from the keyboard.
As time was short and the main aim was to expand my DXCC totals, I decided to go for Single-Op All Band Assisted High Power so that I could use the packet to sniff out the juicier stations. Things started off well with lots of DX audible even though winds forced me to keep the tower wound down. However, within 20 minutes of starting, a squally shower swept through accompanied by thunder and lighting. The only thing to do was to unplug everything in the shack and power down until the storm had passed. This took a good 40 minutes and there were several lightning strikes in the fields surrounding the shack. Once the lightning had passed, things were back up and running again quickly. Conditions were reasonable for the most part and 15m was open to the US and other parts of the world. The best DX worked on 15m was VK9AA for an all time new country at around 1330z. Small runs were possible to the states at times but these did not sustain for very long and the band opened and closed several times. There were also problems with the microkeyer at times which meant some of the keying had to be sent manually. The problem was eventually traced to RF getting into the USB lead from the PC to the microham and a well wrapped ferrite ring seemed to cure this.
In the end, I didn’t operate too long after sunset due to other things coming up and the final totals were as follows:
| Band | QSOs | DXCC | Zones | points |
| 10m | 5 | 5 | 3 | 11 |
| 15m | 55 | 43 | 19 | 136 |
| 20m | 53 | 50 | 20 | 114 |
| 40m | 26 | 26 | 8 | 36 |
| 80m | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 160m | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 139 | 124 | 50 | 51678 |
For only a few hours work, this seemed reasonably successful with a reasonable score and a total of 82 unique DXCC worked which included 7 all time new entities and numerous new band/countries worked. Others also reported successes in the contest with good conditions on the higher bands (although sadly there was not much on 10m).
There is an increasing interest in CW among the active members who join our contest entries and hopefully, it will not be too long until we can mount a major multi-op entry into a big CW contest again.
Article by Dominic Smith, M0BLF, edited by Thomas Wootten, M0FFX.
I participated in the CQWW DX SSB Contest from the Cambridge University Wireless Society, using our contest callsign M4A.
A short audio clip (1m37s) of me running on 20m at about 1220UTC on Sunday can be heard here (RealAudio format) or here (MP3 format).
Summary
| Contest | CQ World Wide DX Contest |
| Callsign | M4A |
| Mode | PHONE |
| Category | Multi Operator – Single Transmitter (MS) |
| Overlay | —- |
| Band(s) | All bands (AB) |
| Class | High Power (HP) |
| Zone/State/… | 14 |
| Locator | JO02AF |
| Operating time | 41h13 |
| BAND | QSO | DUP | DXC | CQ | POINTS | AVG |
| 160 | 73 | 0 | 40 | 6 | 78 | 1.07 |
| 80 | 281 | 0 | 61 | 12 | 331 | 1.18 |
| 40 | 396 | 0 | 85 | 23 | 797 | 2.01 |
| 20 | 980 | 8 | 118 | 35 | 1845 | 1.88 |
| 15 | 591 | 0 | 113 | 31 | 1004 | 1.70 |
| 10 | 189 | 2 | 53 | 16 | 247 | 1.31 |
| TOTAL | 2510 | 10 | 470 | 123 | 4302 | 1.71 |
| TOTAL SCORE | 2 551 086 |
Operators: DL5RB, G3ZAY, G7VJR, KC5WNG, M0BLF, M0DEG, M0FFX, M0HSW, M0TDG, OZ7AGL
Soapbox: A very fun contest entry with a large team made up almost entirely of current students or recent graduates of Cambridge University. We had our fair share of problems, such as melting two baluns during the weekend, which left us with 80m for much of Sunday evening, and we also had only one 14/21/28MHz antenna, so the mult station could not use these bands while the run station was on one of them. Nevertheless, we improved on our score from last year and felt that conditions weren’t as bad as they might have been. More information at http://www.domsmith.co.uk/contests/cqww06/
Set-up
Run station: FT-1000MP, Quadra, Dunestar filters.
Mult station: FT-2000, TL-922, Dunestar filters.
Antennas: 160m dipole, 80m phased array, 80m dipole, 40m four-square, 40m rotating dipole, Stepp-IR.
The antennas were shared between the run and mult stations. This means, of course, that while the run station was on 20m, 15m or 10m, we could not use the mult station on any other of these bands (except if we forced the 40m rotating dipole onto 21MHz).
Logging was with Win-Test, which worked very well except for a small bug in the communication with the FT-2000 (hardly surprising given how new the rig is).
Some pictures of the set-up are at http://www.domsmith.co.uk/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=892.
Highs and lows
Good points were beating last year’s score and taking the opportunity to introduce many students to contesting for the first time.
Low points included melting two baluns, which meant that we couldn’t use 80m for the last four hours on Sunday; getting the mobile tower stuck and not having sufficient antennas for a full mult station.
Band breakdown
(QSO totals below include dupes)
| Band | QSO | % | Time | % | QSO/min. |
| 160 | 73 | 3 | 79 | 4 | 0.924 |
| 80 | 281 | 11 | 273 | 13 | 1.030 |
| 40 | 396 | 16 | 409 | 19 | 0.968 |
| 20 | 988 | 39 | 855 | 39 | 1.160 |
| 15 | 591 | 23 | 411 | 19 | 1.440 |
| 10 | 191 | 8 | 149 | 7 | 1.280 |
| Total | 2520 | 100 | 2176 | 100 | 0.877 |
Distribution
There were 1970 unique calls in the log, of which 2 were worked on all bands, 8 on five bands, 24 on four bands and 82 on three bands.
Rates
There were 76 minutes during which we sustained a rate of four QSOs/minute or higher (individual minutes, not one 76 min period!). On average, we made about 1.02 QSOs/minute during the 41h13min on-time.
The hourly contacts per hour rates were:
| Date | UTC | Rate |
| 28/10 | 0000 | 59 |
| 0100 | 83 | |
| 0200 | 122 | |
| 0300 | 66 | |
| 0400 | 30 | |
| 0500 | 18 | |
| 0600 | 29 | |
| 0700 | 40 | |
| 0800 | 94 | |
| 0900 | 55 | |
| 1000 | 57 | |
| 1100 | 55 | |
| 1200 | 118 | |
| 1300 | 72 | |
| 1400 | 85 | |
| 1500 | 124 | |
| 1600 | 74 | |
| 1700 | 94 | |
| 1800 | 99 | |
| 1900 | 32 | |
| 2000 | 28 | |
| 2100 | 30 | |
| 2200 | 54 | |
| 2300 | 26 | |
| 29/10 | 0000 | 10 |
| 0100 | 8 | |
| 0200 | 15 | |
| 0300 | 16 | |
| 0400 | 9 | |
| 0500 | 23 | |
| 0600 | 12 | |
| 0700 | 24 | |
| 0800 | 31 | |
| 0900 | 61 | |
| 1000 | 101 | |
| 1100 | 85 | |
| 1200 | 95 | |
| 1300 | 127 | |
| 1400 | 35 | |
| 1500 | 74 | |
| 1600 | 30 | |
| 1700 | 34 | |
| 1800 | 57 | |
| 1900 | 63 | |
| 2000 | 21 | |
| 2100 | 15 | |
| 2200 | 12 | |
| 2300 | 18 |
Thanks to everyone who contacted us!
Dominic’s site can be found at http://www.domsmith.co.uk
Statistics on this page created by SH5 – rescab.nm.ru
SH5 v1.18 (25 June 2006)