We were lucky, Sharon and I and booked our holiday with Virgin last October beating the changes made in November to the baggage allowance on the flight. This meant we both had 2 x 23kg plus a sports bag and hand luggage too. The SPE Expert 1K-FA being my amp for this DXpedition is 20kg plus bag and packing bringing it up to 23kg on its own! The rig and various other bits went hand luggage and the coax and antenna's all went in with the T shirts and other bits. All in all we got it all in with no extra charges being made. Arriving on Grenada was a little different to 2009, the island has not had any significant rain since August last year. Everything was brown and dying unlike the beautiful green island of 2009. The temperature was in the mid 30's most of the time and we were grateful for the constant breeze from the North East which at times was very strong. On arrival I started work on setting up the station and getting the antenna's in the air, as always the hotel was very helpful in finding my 20 foot pole from last year and the YP3 beam in a bag was quickly assembled and erected up on the roof.

The dipoles for 80 and 40m were up and this year I added a Delta loop for 40 and 15m vertically polorised which proved to be the best antenna of them all. The 160m antenna was put up after the BERU. Conditions during the BERU were good with 821 Q's in the log. I managed to make that 68% EU, 26% NA, 1%SA, 1% AF, 2% AS and 3% OC. I submitted a score of 7,605 with 99DXC and 14 HQ my time on according to Wintest was 21H but the time off does not add up to 24hours so something not quite right there anyway, I know I was sat in front of the rig for the whole 24 hours with the exception of the odd visit of nature! The FT857D with 500hz filter performed well as did most of the other equipment that was used in the contest. My only problem during the contest was the laptop and wintest, I used the latest version of wintest and it seemed to develop some issues with Windows Vista and crashed at least once an hour. Some might say it was RF but it happened often when in RX! So some may have been RF but there was another problem there that needs ironing out before my next entry to a contest which this year will most likely be the IOTA in July. As we were on Grenada for two weeks, Sharon (J38SW) and I went on after the contest to clock up over 3200 Q's, not bad for a honeymoon I expect!