Field Day

Now, I've never been much of a contester, and I'll never have enough of a station to be a 'Big Gun', but I do enjoy it when I do contest, and with the big station upgrade, I can actually play a bit more.

This weekend was Field Day, which was the first contest I ever played in, with WA2GUG and gang (they now contest under WW2FD)

This year, I was running at home for the first time in a long time (last year I went to W2IRT's place). I ran class 1E (One transmitter, on Emergency Power)

I think I did OK, but when I went to switch over to 80m at around 10pm, I found my 80m antenna would NOT tune, which totally killed the hours between midnight and 6:30am or so, to the point I shut the radio off around 1:30am, and went to bed till 5:45ish (BTW, the antenna tuned FINE post contest - don't ask me)

That said, if you remove the W2IRT score from the Hudson class 1E database (Pete's in Germany), I had an effort that still should bring me a 2nd place, if the scores are the same as last year (1228 QSO points, plus the bulletin, plus 10 battery powered QSOs, plus solar power recharge, plus the 50 points for submitting online - If I do the math off the top of my head right, that's 1578 points - but I have to check the rule book)

(Edit - I eventually found the problem - after Field Day 2012!  Turns out that the barrel connector between the feed line and the riser to the 80m antenna had a thermal intermittent!  Not from RF, but from the daily change in temps.)