Last weekend was the yearly SSB field day, I’d not taken part in this contest for a couple of years properly but this year I decided take part along with the Oxford &DARS. The weather outlook for the weekend was bleek at best, with the forecast being rain and heavy rain so either way it was going to be a soggy field event.
The station was setup Friday afternoon between the odd heavy rain shower which only lasted a couple of minutes at best, so we managed to get the tents and the beam up ready to finish off Saturday morning when we all congregated to finish off setting up the station which was a Yaesu FT-2000, Quadra, and dunstar filters to make spotting using a AOR receiver possible. The antennas were A4S, dipoles for 40/80m and a vertical for the spotting station.
Conditions did seem rather poor for obvious reasons, but when I had my turns I managed to get some decent runs on 20m Saturday afternoon and also on 40/80m during late evening, it did get hard during the early hours of the morning on 80/40m only picking up the odd contact and running seemed a constant task of hitting F1 on the keyboard.
The best part was probably the last 20mins when there was a brilliant opening towards JA which gave us some much needed mults! Overall had a fantastic weekend although I was pleased to get home Sunday for a good nights sleep!
