From Saturday, 18th to Saturday, 25th May 2002 was our fifth activation of IOTA EU-011 - and the third occasion at Green Farm - with the Special Event callsign GB0SM. This year we had four operators - Tom/G0PSE, Bill/G3WNI and two first timers on a DXPed, Dave/M0AOD and Mal/M0BHE - all members of the Taunton and District ARC. Tom accompanied the trailer full of gear on the ferry, Scillonian, while the other three travelled from Penzance to St. Mary's by helicopter. After settling into our QTH, Green Farm, we soon erected our inverted 'L' antenna, driven by the SGC-230 Auto ATU. We started the pile-up on 20 metres with the first two QSOs in the log by the new boys, Dave and Mal. No wives accompanied us on this trip, so not only controlling a pile-up, but also culinary skills were to be tested. One of the main features of this year's DXPed was the weather. The wind was very strong and there were some very heavy showers. On the Sunday we erected the forty foot scaffold mast, but because of the high wind, we were unable to get aloft the 3 element tribander and the Carolina Windom until the next day. We were then able to run two stations, one CW and one SSB. Due to equipment problems, we were not able to operate in RTTY. Not all our time was spent operating, and several enjoyable breaks were taken so that we could enjoy the fine walks around the island when the weather improved. However, the inclement weather again made a big impact when we received a warning that 60 mph (100 kph) winds were expected just as we were about to finish our DXPed, so we decided to take down the main antennas - beam and windom - earlier than intended. To our relief, this was accomplished without injury or damage and we continued with the inverted 'L'. To summarise our radio activity, we were active on all bands 10 to 160 metres, though, because of propagation conditions, mainly 15 to 40 metres. Seventy DXCC entities and all Continents, except Antarctica were worked. This year we added 1800 QSOs to the GB0SM log.
On arrival home, there were 17 Direct QSL cards waiting to be answered. The computer log was sent off to Doug Brandon / N6RT at www.qsl.net who quickly replaced the previous log with the updated version. It has been tested and QSOs that are unique to 2002 have been found in the log.