Exercise Blue Ham result
We made many contacts on the second day of Exercise Blue Ham, another lovely sunny day. We used the same setup as on the first day.
A good start in the morning, and the weather was marvellous for March. After tallying the contacts and taking out two duplicates, we have made 119 SSB voice contacts and two data contacts using the Olivia datamode. We believe there were three MRE cadets stations using Olivia at various times over the weekend, but only contacted two, MRE83 and MRE06. We used DF3CB’s Fast Log Entry to transcribe the paper logs into an ADIF data file.
The Cadet stations were using a wider variety of rigs and antennas and there seememd to be a lot more cadet stations on air than previous exercises. Most stations used dipoles or inverted V dipoles, but among the more unusual stations were MRE90 was running a Clansman which did well for the 30W, giving us a Loud and Clear report both ways from IO94ta near Hull. MRE28 near Glasgow were using a magnetic loop and an Icom IC756, and MRE53 in the Brecon Beacons were using an Alinco DX-SR9 with a horizontal quad loop.
Thanks to everybody involved for a great result, and of cours thanks to RAFAC and the cadets for getting so many stations on the air! The Blue Ham team tell us the next date will be in June, exact date TBD.
We experienced minor equipment failure - the fan failed in the mains to 12V power supply so we temporarily fitted a computer case fan to the outside to cool it. On Saturday our data station was knocked off the air by RF feedback which seemed to corrupt the FLdigi installation, or perhaps FLdigi didn’t clean up properly across the reset. And our borrowed generator stopped when the oil ran low. Thankfully, none of these were catastrophic, and could be resolved during the exercise.