From 6th October to 13th October 2001, this was our fourth activation of IOTA EU-011 - and the
second occasion at Green Farm - with the Special Event callsign GB0SM.  Because of health
problems, Doug / G0WMW and his wife, Sue had to cancel their booking a couple of weeks before
the DXPed.  All attempts to find replacements were unsuccessful, so  Tom / G0PSE, with
Bill / G3WNI with his wife Tessa decided to go ahead on  their own.
The first two weeks in October is a very popular time for birds migrating south to visit the
Scillies and the population of the Scillies is swelled by visiting bird watchers.

Weather was to prove a big factor on this trip.  The sea crossing on Saturday 6th. for Tom and
the trailer of equipment was very rough and the storm was to continue for several days after.
Bill and Tessa made the 30 miles crossing by helicopter.
Having set up the station operating position indoors, our attention then turned to the problem
of errecting the antenna.  Because of our man-power constraints, we decided to keep it simple
and use our 'emergency' antenna which is the SGC-230 SmarTuner and the DK9SQ fibre-glass mast.
The antenna wire from the SmarTuner was helical-wound around the DK9SQ to a height of 9 metres,
then led away in a North West direction to form an Inverted L.  The antenna wire was 30 metres
of light-weight twin (multi-strand) speaker wire.  We laid out about six radials and were on
the air working YO6EX at 1954 GMT in CW on 20 metres.
The next day, Sunday,  the storm was even more fierce, and in the high wind and driving rain
all we could manage to improve our antenna was to lay out more radials and put up a second
DK9SQ to support the far end of the Inverted L.   With this simple set-up we found we were
working into not only Europe, but also Japan, Colombia, Brazil, the Carribean and North America.
Things weren't so bad after all !   On Monday morning we spent some time assembling the 20 feet
scaffold poles into a forty feet mast, but due to a combination of high wind, fatigue and 
man-power shortage, the whole assembly crashed to earth.  Fortunately, no one (and no antenna)
was damaged.  We then decided to make the most of what we had going for us and elected to 
restrict ourselves to just the Inverted L.
During the week we worked 78 DXCC entities and increased our grand total from 104 to 121 DXCC
worked - so we were very pleased with the outcome.
The weather at the end of the DXPed was just the opposite. Nil wind, flat calm and sea mist.
The morning flights of the helicopter service were cancelled because of poor visibility and
quite a number of bird-watcher passengers had to transfer to the sea ferry.
Once again, the GB0SM log was posted to www.qsl.net/gb0sm - which can be accessed from this
web site - and Webmaster Al Waller very soon had it available for accessing.