This contest is only 2 hours long but lots of fun, for those 2 hours it is difficult to find a clear spot on 40m here in Southern Africa.

This year Katti, my YL and myself setup a multi operator field station on a clear area close to our house. We also used the opportunity to have a little picnic at the same time. We used our normal 6m mast with an inverted V. This year we used a FT-890 radio set to the Japanese 50W setup. We wanted to run less than 50W during this contest and I decided that this will be a great way to make sure we do not get tempted to turn up the power!

40m was VERY noisy, we had thunder storms all around the area but at least we stayed dry !. During 90% of the contest the static was at the S9 or above level but signals were mostly strong. It was soon evident that we had a great signal so, to conserve battery power I turned the power down to 20W for most of the contest. 

After the dust settled we had a few more contacts that last year, I am sure everyone had more contacts because participation seemed to be better this year. Apart from all the usual ZS stations from divisions 1,2,4,5 and 6 we also worked 2 7P8 stations and an A22 as well. It was great to hear some of our neighbors also getting into the contest !. Now we only need to get someone from division 3 active!

Now we have to wait for the results, I do not believe we won like last year but we still had lots of fun and we will be back for 2004!

Well the results just came in, WE WON! Katti (ZS6KVR) and myself won the Multi-op portable category of this contest for the second year running!

Here are the complete results:

The winners were:

Single operator stationary mobile:          7P8BHF          Martin
Single operator portable:                        ZS2AJ            André
Multi-operator portable:                     ZS6DX            Rudi
Base station:                                        ZS2U              Al

The full results are listed below:

Category                            Call sign     Contacts     Points
=====================================================================

Single Operator stationery Mobile      7P8BHF           40       1590
                                       ZS5SK            24        550
                                       ZS6GBJ            9        120

Single Operator Portable               ZS2AJ            40       1200
                                       ZS6BUU           48        990
                                       ZS5R             21        825
                                       ZS2MW             5        126

Multi-operator Portable                ZS6DX            46       1995
                                       ZS5ZLB           50       1404

Single Operator Base Station           ZS2U             49       2232
                                       ZS4NS            42       2034
                                       ZS5ABD           30        770
                                       ZS5WP            27        680
                                       ZS1BFE           15        100