Again my local club, CARA, decided to have a bash at another contest. This time it was SSB Field day. Like NFD I provided the station and a 120 foot doublet this time. We actually used my IC-7300 as it’s easy to extract from the shack, unlike the K3. It performed very well, but integration could have been better with N1MM+ for voice keying etc had I had more set-up time before the contest.
The inbuilt ATU in the rig didn’t like the doublet fed via balun and coax, nor did my LDG AT100Pro2, but that appears to have a fault. In the end I drove home and grabbed the KAT500 and SGC230 just in case. In the end the KAT500 tuned the aerial fine.
We made 398q in the end, more thanks to the efforts of Martin G4ENZ than my operating time – which was limited. We did have a couple of other club members try out HF contesting, so hopefully they’ll appear in other events too.