This year to a bout of apathy I stayed at home for the two legs of the 80m AFS. So it was the K3 barefoot to a 66 foot long doublet. The doublet had to be replaced the day before the CW leg as the guy who took the top out of the silver birch also managed to break the antenna! Using the Spiderpole it is really easy to accurately place a rope over the wanted fork in the tree.
The good:
The CW leg was good fun. With this system there is little point calling CQ early on. So in search and pounce, the first hour netted 54 Qs and the second hour 59. From then on it was a mixture of CQ and S&P. I finished the event with 188 QSOs which is only 40 less than 2013 with a full size higher antenna in the Swan back garden. With the K3 filters it was always possible to find a "clear" frequency.
The bad:
Before the SSB leg people were staking their frequency claims from mid-morning onwards. With only 125kHz to play with it is always going to be challenging. I started late due to the poor system and two sweeps of the band took an hour and netted 54 QSOs. From that point onwards it was downhill and a case of waiting for new stations to find a CQ frequency. The best quote I saw was "it felt like a rave in a shipping container with people
banging the sides with sledgehammers" !! The end was a disappointing 90 QSOs and a remembering of just why I usually avoid this one.
