GB5HQ - July 2003

This story starts in July 2002 when I was in Finland the the 2002 WRTC Games.  Two of the UK visitors, RadCom editor Steve G4JVG, and Contest Columnist Tim G4VXE were going to help operate at OI2HQ - the Finnish National Societies 'Headquarters Station' as part of the IARU contest.   The IARU contest rules allow each national society to enter a multi-operator / multi-transmitter station.   Previously the RSGB entry has been from a single location - but in recent years the category leaders have operated from a number of sites around the country, without the normal problems of space or interference that would usually occur.

The RadioCommunications Agency were approached to see if something similar would be allowed for the UK, and they agreed.  GB5HQ was going to be run from 10 sites across England, Wales and Scotland, operating on all 6 contest
bands on SSB *and* CW.

A number of sites and teams were assembled.  A vital part of the operation would be the ability to link all of the station logs together, and to enable 'passing' of multipliers from one band to another needed band / mode.  To
achieve this the Windows based Writelog was used, with linking over the internet.  Some of the field day type stations were using GPRS to connect to the Internet.   Other stations used a normal dialup, others had broadband
access.

The other benefit of the linking was to be able to tell callers where our other stations could be found.  There was an award programme created to incite some interest in chasing GB5HQ around the bands, and this proved quite successful.

I was operating at the 80m SSB station, at the Open University's Radio Club site at Milton Keynes, along with Fraser G4BJM, Tim M0BEW, and Linda M0CMK.   We had a dipole at around 110 feet which worked quite well !

The actual contest itself went well - apart from a few stations dropping off the network everything seemed to work ok.  The weather was very hot - the in shack thermometer went past 90F and hit the end stop.    It was a challenge
to route fresh air past the amplifier exhaust fans.

After the dust had settled, we'd made 12,891 QSOs in 24 hours, which should give us a high placing in the results.  We didn't beat our German counterparts this year, but hope to strike gold in 2004.

More details can be found at http://www.gb5hq.com
 
 

G0MTN on Sunday morning	Tim M0BEW and Fraser G4BJM
Linda M0CMK	In shack thermometer end-pegged !