Not a year to live long in the memory! Whilst editing my watchlist in AirScout soon after the start, I managed to delete the watchlist instead. I have recovered from this problem in the past by using System Restore to return to a previous restore point, and it had not taken too long. Not so this time - after waiting for well over an hour whilst the registry was restoring, I decided to abort the restore. It then took another hour to undo the restore, and I still had an empty watchlist. After some manual reconstruction and enabling the auto update from wtKST I was back up and running, but three hours into the contest. Not a great start.

After that it was playing catch up in poor conditions, even aircraft scatter signals seemed weak and of short duration on 1.3GHz. Activity was low too. I focused exclusively on 1.3 and 2.3GHz for the 8 hour duration of the RSGB Trophy contests, missing a possible QSO with PE1MMP on 10GHz. Late evening was spent on 432MHz S&P until 2300z. Sunday I started on 432MHz and then mainly looked for higher band QSOs but activity levels and conditions were poor, so numbers of QSOs were down. My 24GHz receiver proved to be faulty, so no QSOs were made on that band this year.

Operation on 432MHz was mainly from 0640z to 0815z on Sunday. QSOs over 600km were DL0GTH/P (JO50), DR9A (JN48), OL4A (JO60), OK2A (JO60), DF0XG (JO51), DL3LAR (JO52), and DJ3AK (JO52)

The outcome on 1.3GHz was similar to last year. Contacts over 600km included DR9A (JN48), DL0GTH/P (JO50), DF4IAO (JN48), DF0YY (JO62), DJ3AK (JO52), OK2A (JO60), DL6SH (JN48), DL2FQ (JN48), DL3LAR (JO52).

Activity seemed very poor on 2.3GHz. Aircraft scatter contacts over 500km were DR9A (JN48), and DL3IAE (JN49).

3.4GHz seemed to be working well - but no activity! DL3IAE was heard via AS but reflections were too short to complete a QSO.

5.7GHz gave a surprise contact when I was able to tail end M1CRO/P with DR9A, but otherwise activity was non-existent.

Conditions on 10GHz were very poor, I was pleased to work DF0HS/P on tropo but other tests in the 300-400km range drew a blank.

73

John G3XDY

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