IOTA 2000 report by Jim  Martin, MM0BQI. 

BENBECULA   REVISITED  (or  What a difference a yagi makes.) 

To go or not to go that was the question up until four hours before departing to Skye for the ferry.  With so many other things happening it was touch and go but after four hours sleep on Thursday night I set off at 04.00 for Uig and the Hebridean Isles ferry to Lochmaddy.  Colin, GM0CLN,  had found a suitable site for me to use this year during his travels with Bob the previous week, and this turned out to be a great location.

 After last years success I have worked on improving the station. The major purchase was an FT1000MP but I feel  the Icom 746 can hold its own when it comes to dealing with QRM of which there is a lot in any contest !  A minor purchase (at the Lothians junk sale) was an old triband yagi which looked as though it had spent all its life indoors.    The new MFJ voice recorder and a Heil head set completed the upgrades.  Logging was again with SuperDuper by EI5DI which is a fantastic set of programs for the single operator.  Have a look at www.ei5di.com for more information.

After listening to experienced contesters it was clear that the area most likely to give the greatest improvement was in the antenna systems.  The 4 band vertical was raised to a height of 16 feet agl, insulated from the mast and 16 radials added sloping down to the ground.  The 80m dipole was dropped to 18 feet above ground for working into the UK and a 40m sloping dipole added to give some gain into Europe.

The shinny new (about 12 years old) tribander was put up at 16 feet using a short gin pole.  The yagi had a slight advantage on receive but not too much over the vertical.  I was starting to wonder if the extra work was worthwhile.  On transmit the reports were amazing, a minimum of 3 S points of a difference and often much more !  Once the contest started I used the front to back and the side of the beam to cut down the heavy QRM and that was where the great difference in receive was noticed.  With no rotator and a mad dash of about 25 yards to turn the yagi the full benefits were not felt. It was not really utilised for working DX, but set up and left pointing in the same general direction for long periods.  There will be a rotator on the yagi for the next outing.

Facts and figures. 

Band              80      40      20       15      10   

QSOs              94      342     600      129     45  =  1210

IOTA Refs         23      49      61       49      8   =  170

(Last years total   650 QSOs, 135 Refs and 650,000 points)

(Last years total   650 QSOs, 135 Refs and 650,000 points)

A few failures and problems to overcome, the most worrying was 40watts maximum out from the FT for an hour or so.  The vertical had to be radically retuned on site possibly because it was previously tuned next to the beach on the Summer Isles.  I was on air for a total of twenty hours, three hours sleep between 05.00 - 08.00 and I had to pack up an hour before the end of the contest to catch the ferry home.  It was a hard trip with no time to stop for breath but well worth the effort. Next year will be more of the same and lots of experiments with antennas over the winter and also hopefully a change of location to take advantage of a rarer IOTA reference.

Thanks to Cary for making it possible to drop everything at the last minute and go, to Colin and Bob Smith for finding the site, to Derek, GM0EEY, for helping me to dismantle the station and to everyone who worked me.

73 and hope to work you from the next Island trip.

Jim