We were blessed with a good mix of sunshine and enough rain to ease insertion of my trusty guy anchors and give something conductive to feed the vertical against.
My lessons learned are (as usual) too numerous to list but I guess the main ones are to double check everything before the off (I had set up CAT frequency control the previous day but the configuration had somehow got lost) and spend more time checking out propagation the previous day. I managed to resist the temptation to grab some sleep during the small hours but despite the very few QSOs most were bonuses. John 9H6A succumbed soon after midnight and woke shortly before 0700, missing a lot of the morning excitement!
I had called Mike VYI unsuccessfully on and off, a good signal for much of Friday, but then failed altogether to find him at the weekend. Nigel meanwhile inhabited the bottom few khz of every band and was workable somewhere or other just about all the time. I was very pleased with the performance of my multiband vertical, inspired by G7FEK, which weighed in at a total of 1.6kg.
http://www.sral.fi/turva/G7FEKantenna.pdf
I shall certainly use it again. After setting it up at home beforehand, little more tweaking was needed on site to achieve better than 2:1 on all bands. I had suspended additional 16.5 ft and 25 ft vertical elements between the catenary and the feed point to allow operation on 20 and 10 (3/4 wave), together with appropriate tuned counterpoises.
Pics show the antenna and outlook, Col 9H4CT who helped lift the mast and my corner of his shack.
73, Peter G3LET
Commonwealth Contest 