I found myself free for this year’s contest and thought, why not dust off the official club call GW4TTA and let it sing on the airwaves once again? I decided to do it properly — truly portable (hence GW4TTA/p), going back to basics with no internet cluster crutches, no comforting hum of mains power, and just a single temporary antenna standing proudly against the elements.
The entire station was built from the ground up on Saturday morning at “Draughty Towers,” the wonderfully breezy QTH of Les, MW0SEC. There’s no such thing as a Field Day without a proper field, and thanks to Les generously offering up his patch of grass (plus a prime parking spot for my campervan shack), I had the perfect base of operations.
By 1500 UTC, everything was ready — the antennas straining skyward, the gear humming, and the spirit of adventure in full swing. There’s something exhilarating about starting from scratch and embracing the challenge head-on. It was radio in its purest, most liberating form — and I loved every minute of it.
This was only ever intended to be a low key ‘have some fun’ effort. For one thing I decided to forget the hassle of 160m capability. CW Field Day includes 160m unlike the SSB version in September and I would lose many points because contacts on this band score double points. The antenna used was a Sotabeams 40/30/20m linked dipole to which I added an extra ~9m link on Saturday morning to cover 80m; you may be able to make out the links in the above photo.
Weather was cloudy but dry so trimming these for resonance was easy with my NanoVNA. Total length was around 40m and fitted comfortably into Les’s field, held aloft on a heavy duty 7m telescopic pole which could easily be retracted to access the links when changing bands. Being effectively a dipole rather than a tuned doublet on the main bands the antenna was run N-S for principal east/west lobes. Radio was a spare K3 with the internal ATU used for 10m and to squeeze out 4 contacts on 160m with the 80m dipole link; it was also used on 15m when feeding the 40m dipole as the SWR was slightly high despite being basically resonant at 3/2 wavelengths. Power was near 100w but reduced when I knew the swr would be high at the feed point such as 160m and threatening to burn out the tiny choke balun. Electricity was supplied by my small Honda generator and logging was done with Dxlog software on my laptop. Barring an issue with a dodgy headphone connector still to be investigated everything ran pretty smoothly and I even grabbed a couple of hours sleep in the ‘dead hours’.
Conditions were good enough to keep me reasonably busy much of the time. This contest runs in synchrony with the IARU Region 1 CW Field Day organised by the German national organisation and there are always plenty of German portable stations on for the 24 hours. It’s basically a European contest with a smattering of North Americans and occasional DX which for me was a solitary 5Z4VJ in Kenya. It’s also essentially a club group contest but there were a handful of single operator entries normally due to a shortage of CW operators. My claimed scores were posted on the Facebook page after the contest and repeated here (Photo2) but the official final scores after adjudication have just been published and it’s these that tell the real story that don’t normally get seen –
My QSO total has gone down from 773 to 768 due to 5 broken exchanges (‘busts’) with the points reducing from 284,088 to 281,160. All this is explained to entrants in a personalised error report shown in the photo below which also shows the error rate compared to the average for all entrants.
There’s more satisfaction to be gained from contesting than simply winning….!
Stew GW0ETF (operating GW4TTA/p)
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