National Field Day, 2003.

In June 2002, Phil Smeaton, G0HSS, decided not to operate field day with the Windmill Group, G0FBB/P, as he had done in previous years, but instead decided to join friends on the Isle of Man who were entering the 50Mhz Trophy contest. Using a borrowed HF rig, Phil also put in a small entry in the QRP section of NFD as GD4IOM/P. Known variously as the Northern Lights or Manx Kippers, the GD team has been active as MD4K in several HF contests, and rather go back to the Windmill Group for this year’s NFD, Phil organised a serious entry from a field adjoining GD4GNH’s QTH on the side of South Barrule mountain. A combination of the location , monoband antennas on the HF bands, good operating, and of course the attractiveness of the GD prefix on CW enabled the team to make over 1500 QSOs for a record Open Section score of 5505 points. Congratulations to G4MJS, G4XUM, G0HSS, M0BEW and G1GEY, though they had computer problems at the start and in the TT race weekend described their generator as ’kick start’ - you had to give it a kick before it would start.

The other success story of this year’s field day is a 30% increase in the number of entries. There were some last-minute and part-time entries, and those who gave it a go enjoyed themselves and promised to be back next time. The Bracknell group described last year how easy it is to mount an entry in the QRP section using a small rig such as the Elecraft K2. Most groups use a doublet, typically 270ft top. Although two supports are allowed, all you really need is a single 36ft mast to support the centre. It’s also acceptable to use one or two convenient trees, the important thing is that no part of the antenna may be higher than 11 metres. In the Open section the height limit is 20 metres.

Conditions were generally reported as poor, and a coronal mass injection from the sun further depressed conditions on the Saturday evening, but logs show portable operations from 32 European countries. While the bulk of this is from Germany and the UK with long-time support also from Belgium and Switzerland, it’s good to see increasing interest from Russia, Italy and several Balkan countries amongst others. This all helps to raise QSO totals, and this year 14 groups exceeded 1000 QSOs.

RESTRICTED SECTION.
Congratulations to the Orkney group, operated by GM3OPI and G3MXJ, who returned to the top spot to win the Bristol Trophy with a strong performance on all three HF bands. Most of their 10m QSOs were made from about 0850 to 1030 UTC on Sunday.
Three experienced operators, G0IVZ, G4EDG and G4TSH came together to form a new group, the ’Flying Pigs’ and they flew into second place to win the Gravesend Trophy operating from Hampshire. They are followed by the trophy’s namesake, Gravesend RS, G3GRS/P, operated by G4BUO and G4IFB.

OPEN SECTION.
While the Manx Kippers are to be congratulated on their record score to take the NFD Shield, past winners Lichfield, G3NKC/P, kept them within sight with excellent totals on the double-point bands of top band and 10m, giving G3NKC, G3VHB and G0MTN the G6ZR Trophy. There was a tight battle for third place, won eventually by Bristol, G6YB/P, operated by G0WKW, G3XSV, G3TKF and M0MAT.
The two contenders for the Frank Hoosen G3YF trophy for 20m were both in the open section, and the Hadley Wood CG, G4STV/P, ran up a very good score, but it was always going to be tough to beat Guernsey, GU3HFN/P. It’s good to see past 20m winners G3SDC/P move up to a very respectable sixth place all-band, perhaps Guernsey would consider this for 2004?

LOW-POWER SECTION.
Echelford, G3UES/P, proved they have strength in depth, winning the section and gaining the Reading Trophy for the second year, but this time without former operators G4TSH who ‘defected’ to the Flying Pigs, and G3KKQ who was away on the Isle of White visiting a friend. Congratulations to operator John, G4IRN, and the whole team which included M0SAR, G0VDZ, M0WDX, G2HS, G3XTZ, G4PRI, G0JSH, G0SHW and M3PMT. When not partying, Dennis G3KKQ, found the time to put up a 40m dipole at 15ft and make nearly 100 QSOs.
Last year’s runners-up, Bracknell, G4BRA/P, again operated their very neat K2-based station to come second on QRP, and as predicted in the 2002 write-up, Stevenage, G3SAD/P, improved again to edge above Reading, G3ULT/P.

ELVASTON CASTLE.
Many field day sites are on land open to the public, or situated close to a footpath, and if you’re approached by a member of the public asking what’s going on, it’s a great opportunity to tell them something about the hobby of amateur radio. Field day shows that it is possible to set up an effective station at short notice, and it provides a convincing answer to the question ‘whats the difference between ham radio and just calling someone on the mobile?’ because we can demonstrate our ability to make contacts right around the world without any telecommunications infrastructure at all.
Clubs that do field day and similar events have a stock of information sheets ready to hand out, and preferably have members of the team who are willing to explain things to visitors. You never know, this year’s curious visitor could be next years M3 operator!

RAFARS, G8FC/P, did a great publicity job, as related by contest manager G3ZDW: ’The Royal Air Force Amateur Radio Society’ normally has a display at the Elvaston Castle Mobile Rally. However this year the dates clashed with NFD. We came up with an idea of running both events as one. As well as solving our problems of running two events it would give the opportunity to show amateur radio fraternity and the general public what Field Day ia all about, knowing that the majority of licensed amateurs had never seen an NFD station in operation.

What were the problems and how could we make it interesting for the general public? Under normal conditions the operator would be there with headphones on and operating the key and keyboard, not very interesting. However, we also wanted to operate the contest without the general public getting in the way of the stations operating efficiency. So that the public could hear what was going on, a speaker was connected to the rigs output stage giving both transmitted and received audio. Running off the logging computer was a second VDU, showing a copy of the SD log, which created a lot of interest. We also had a cw reader showing the decoded cw text on the screen, this worked best with out transmission, could normally hear several cw stations at the same time, which is of course the normal situation in NFD. Multiple Signals tended to cause corruption of the text in the cw reader.
There were members of the team available to explain and show the public what we were doing. Handouts were distributed explaining NFD and the basic rules. The whole thing was a success as we had a lot of listeners and viewers with some staying quite a while watching out progress while others kept returning to check on our advancing score.
ADMIN.
Seven groups were inspected this year, and thanks are due to all the inspectors, especially GD3HDL and GD4OEA for arranging a visit the group that turned out to be the overall winners. There was a problem with one group that had failed to give correct site access information, and this led to several complicated phone calls during Saturday afternoon. If the inspector cannot locate your site due to inadequate information you risk disqualification.
Only a handful of paper logs were received, and thanks go to G3UFY who keyed them in. Most entries came by e-mail and the majority were in Cabrillo format. Before sending your log file, open it with a viwer such as Notepad and check that everything looks OK, and that you have specified the section correctly. While SD handles NFD well, the output from other logging programs will at least have to be edited to show required information. Worse, the Cabrillo output from TR-Log doesn’t include sent serial numbers, which meant in this case that they had to be carefully inserted during the checking process.
Please use Cabrillo ‘SOAPBOX’ lines to give details of equipment and antennas used, as well as giving comments for the write-up. A selection of comments appear in the soapbox section but from this Clifton, G3GHN/P, should be heeded by all NFD operators: ‘ Use of computers means that people hardly ever slow down when you ask for QRS and you can sense the impatience if you ask for a repeat. Giving real reports to people also causes some shock. We had 12+ club members on site, but most are too frightened by the cw speed to operate. Speeds made search and pounce very difficult so we sat on one frequency and called CQ at about 14wpm. Callers still came back at 20wpm+. This really doesn’t help anyone. I understand PC’s are here to stay, but please learn how to vary the speed.’

The HF Contests Committee thanks all of those who participated in NFD 2003 and looks forward to seeing you in next years contest.

Dave Lawley, G4BUO.