Commonwealth  Contest 2010 St Lucia

The planning for this trip was a lot longer than I normally allow for my holidays. Way back in April 2009, soon after the dust had settled on my 2009 9H3JT BERU activity, I started to look for somewhere new where a holiday and a BERU activity could be combined. We had never been to St Lucia so I started to investigate what might be possible. It certainly seemed from various comments that getting the licence might be a long drawn out process but that it would be possible, and so it turned out.

I completed the licence forms on 27 May 2009 and finally had the licence in hand on the 4 March 2010!. I wont go through the detail here but contact me if you are really interested in what takes the time. Its largely the postal services. By November 2009 it was clear that I would get the necessary permissions so the hunt started for a site.

Of course the location requirements for the villa became a bit critical i.e. good open ocean views in as many directions as possible, certainly north, east, west and a bit to the south west would be good. And this is what it looked like in practice from a location on the north of the island known as Saline Point.

Now getting to J6 is not difficult, Virgin/BA etc. all fly there and the idea of piggy backing on a package holiday is a good one from the value point of view. So we decided on a 2 centre approach, one week in a standard package holiday resort and then one week in a villa for some serious CW operating.

The cottage is a 65m ASL and in the far distance you could see FM land at about 25 miles.

As this was to be a 'carry in everything' trip I decided that for BERU, an entry in the restricted 100w/single element antennas section was the way to go.

The antennas were :

80m Inv L with one elevated radial pointing north and a 40m vertical with elevated radials fed in parallel. Both these were mounted on a single 12m Spiderpole. Now at G3PJT this looked very good - in J6 different rules apply evidently and the 40m element was over long. So I tried to feed is separately with rather mixed results.

For HF I decided to try something a bit different, a vertical 10m centre fed doublet fed with open wire feeder via a balun. The virtue of this was that I didn't have to mess about with trimming for resonance, and in fact this is just how it worked, 'straight out of the box', very simple and effective. This was taped to a 10m pole from Bavaria! It was fed via about 10m of 400 ohm ribbon suitably treated with a hole punch to reduce losses and sprayed with water repellant - not that we had any rain whilst we were there, I hadn't realised how effective these treatments could be! The entire Caribbean is suffering from a drought this year.

Both these antennas were mounted on the raised wooden patio as you can see in the pictures. The hole for the parasol in the table was just right for the HF doublet. You can't see the jacuzzi on the patio though! This is a holiday too!

I had, when I made the original licence application, intended to take my K2 but having become the proud owner of a K3 ( and having sold the K2 to Rag in the meantime) I decided to take the K3 instead. In part I must say because the K3 has a lot of the various interfaces built in and has a far better receiver.

In addition I took enough wire for both a 40m delta loop and 100m of thin wire for anything else I had not thought of.

So this is final operating set up - K3 with USB-serial to the ASUS EeePC running Win-Test, usual SM power supply (useful in J6 where the voltage is only 220v) - all pretty simple really.

About a week before we were due to depart the UK I got a mail from Robbie GM3YTS requesting a topband sked. for a 'new one'. In typical fashion I replied, 'maybe'.

Pre-contest operating

I thought the demand for J6 was pretty well covered with operations from US groups in almost every contest, how wrong can you be! Even short tests raised huge pileups and as 12m is now showing some nice openings, there was plenty of interest. As most of you know my holidays are organised around the Commonwealth Contest and any other operating was holiday style and rather casual. In all about 700 further odd Qs of pile up practice added to the fun.

BERU weekend.

So after a few PC problems with interfaces and some sulking by Microsoft XP I managed to have a working station for BERU ready in time. I started off on 80m, as at 10:00UTC it is dawn in J6 and it is always necessary to have a quick run round 80 working everything you can find before the sun shuts it down for 12 hours. As soon as I went to 40 and at almost the first keypress, the K3 locked into transmit. I guess this was RFI in the PC and the only way out seemed to be to switch off and restart , not a good omen. To get round the problem I inserted an extra length of coax in the feed to the 40m antenna the net effect of which was to seemingly attenuate the signal somewhat. I guess the antenna or a connector had failed. In BERU this was giving myself a real extra 'restriction'.

However immediately the HF bands showed signs of life I could see that the propagation would be like a 'normal' BERU and not abnormally LF as in 2009.

10m was certainly open to VE quite a bit - the problem was that no VEs seemed to know it, in fact my first VE was a VE2 just calling CQ for a chat. What fooled people was that 10 opened early and then closed, just when the VEs were asking for QSYs. - most frustrating. I only managed 5 Qs when many more must have available.

That said, propagation never seemed to extend further east than VU, and I did not hear any VK6s yet VKs from their east coast were strong at times, as were ZLs - on the trans Pacific path. I did manage to catch the late night opening to VK/ZL but I felt the low power didn't really have the punch necessary to attract lots of attention.

As the daylight ended the lack of an effective 40m antenna made itself really felt and in desperation I tried to use the HF doublet and much to my surprise the ATU in the K3 was able to get a good match! And signals were much better on the doublet than on the 40 vertical. So I used the HF doublet on 40m for the second half of BERU. This cheered me up somewhat.

In the end I managed 673Qs for 6985 points, not bad for a 100w station. The 100w does mean that even with a call like J6/G3PJT you can't penetrate the G pile up wall on DX from the east, but you do attract some of the unwanted callers. (I do have a black list who I intend to email this year.) But that said, such callers were very bad early on but slowly dropped away over the 24 hours as they found bigger or rarer fish to annoy or they just plain gave up.

I would just like to acknowledge all the hard graft the BERU group have put in, contacting rarer call areas (GI0RTN), helping the team captains build up their teams (G3LET), answering the inevitable questions on rules etc, (G3VQO) and the many individuals across the Commonwealth who take part to make the event such a big success and not forgetting Paul EI5DI, our medal sponsor.

12m

Wow just amazing pile ups, but quite short lived for the most part, still a sign of things to come on 10 and 12 in the next few years.

160m

And what about 160, Robbie asked (begged? but not bribed(!)) me to try and do something. In the event I added 20m to the sloping wire on the 80m inv L and extended the north pointing radial also by 20m. When I checked this on the miniVNA this gave a resonance at 1800 - pretty well the best I could do. Extending the radial by 20m brought the end very close to the steep face of the cliff. I was struck immediately how quiet it was (there are no overhead power lines in that part of Saline Point.). A tentative CQ an 1820 brought a chatty QSO with Pete, K3ZM. followed by a series of shorter and shorter Qs with other topbanders as the news spread that J6 was active. EI7BA was just an amazing signal. At 0210 I managed the QSO with Robbie - he was a genuine 57/99 and what I had thought was going to be a struggle was in the end rather easy. Later on the second 160m night with Robbie having alerted CDXC I managed Qs with GM0GAV, MD0CCE, G3PQA, G3WPH, G3UJE and other EUs and lots of US stations. I realise that my signal was probably pretty weak but for such a simple, last minute, set up it was a very successful attempt. Next year we may be able to do much better.

Anyway I have an email to prove that Robbie will stand me a beer sometime - you can be sure I will be holding him to that.

Overall

Rosemary and I made a good choice - a super hotel for the first chill out and decompression week on the beach and a great site for continued relaxation and some radio in the second week. We plan to return in 2011. My heartfelt thanks to the authorities in St Lucia for the licence. We have reserved the cottage for 2011 so see you all then.