Luton VHF Group - G3SVJ / G2L


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We took part in the 2017 BARTG Sprint contest on January 28th and 29th. Some of the group (Don, G4LOO; Bryan, M0BIK and Terry, G4UEM) braved the -2 deg C temperature on the Thursday before the contest to erect most of the antennas. It had warmed up a bit for the contest weekend but was still frosty overnight. Ian, G1JCC and Andy, G8ATD joined the group on Saturday. We had two Kenwood transceivers driving ACOM PAs. Ian provided two new Dell PCs running the N1MM logging program. We didn’t get off to a good start with various problems so we didn’t think we would do very well. In the end we made 757 contact that was better than 2016. Conditions were not very good with 10m not open at all and 15m only part of the time. The lower bands were pretty good.

Because it was so cold overnight we put up a tent in the barn with heating. The sausages and bacon for breakfast were is a fridge overnight an froze solid (see picture)

We entered the MM (Multi transmitter, multi operator section) that Don had spotted as a new section in the 2017 rules. When Ian submitted the log he was told there was no MM section but after an email exchange pointing out the announcement on the BARTG web site they admitted we could enter that section and in fact were the only entrant in that section. Obviously not many people read the rules!