October 2000.

This was the third successive year that we have activated St
Mary's with the callsign GB0SM - and a different QTH each time. 
This year we were at Green Farm where we had plenty of space to
put up as many antennas as we liked.  

We ran two stations, Doug/G0WMW was on SSB all the time with his 
IC-706 Mk2G.  The other station, manned by Tom/G0PSE or
Bill/G3WNI was mainly CW, but also used for SSB, RTTY and some
PSK31. The rig for this was an Icom IC-725.   We had an IC-735 as
standby, but it was not needed.

We started off with a 40 ft (13 metres) Ground Plane tuned via a
SGC-230 SmartTuner with plenty of radials laid out. We were able
to use this on 10-160 metres. The top of the GP supported a
tri-band wire dipole (10, 15 and 20m).  The next antenna to be
errected was the GAP Titan (10-40m).  As this belonged to Doug,
he used it in conjuction with his IC-706.
Bill's second hobby is kite flying, so we flew his Delta kite at
a heightof 200 feet (60m) and that supported an 85 feet (28m)
W3EDP which gave very good results and a new country in the log
with YC2OBL.
Eventually the scaffold poles we had arranged to use were
delivered, and we then used a HyGain 3 element tribander (10, 15
and 20m) at a height of 30 feet (9m). The Logging and station
management was done using Turbolog 3, which included RTTY via a
PK-232.  PSK31 was used with Bob Furzer's Logger software. Doug
ran his set-up with LogEQF and as the two stations were not
network linked, at the end of each day, Doug's log was imported
into Tom's Turbolog log, which was the master log for the whole
operation. The QSL labels have been produced from this master
log.

On returning home to Taunton, Somerset, after our week on St.
Mary's, we found that some QSL cards had arrived before us.
The complete GB0SM Log (1998, 1999 and 2000) was E-mailed to
WWW.QSL.NET for inclusion in their data base to enable DXers to
check on their QSOs. 
The Logs are available for searching here on this Web site.

Doug took some photographs with his digital camera. 
These can be seen on this Web site in the Picture Gallery.



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