Just for a change we had perfect weather, sun and fairly low wind speeds! The two club members, M0HVD and M0PCR arrived in good time to put up the tent and the station and spend 15 minutes or so listening to the stations participating in the VHF NFD. Amazingly there were Scottish and Northern Irish stations to be heard, well above the noise level and we had to wait tentatively until the contest began hoping that the good propagation would last.
It did and worked a station in Northern Ireland within 5 minutes. The rest of the backpackers contest was hard work with the band being so crowded with big stations until 3pm which was the end of the VHF NFD. We tried a number of strategies, tuning up and down the band moving the beam every 5 – 10 minutes, and calling CQ when we could find an available frequency.
From our site on the south coast, of course beaming north tends to have the most success as there are not so many continental stations about. We did hear the odd call from the continent but only managed to work one station in Germany as propagation was quite varaiable. We decided to call it a day at 3:30pm after several attempts to work a fellow backpacker station in Northumberland but the QSB proved to be too challenging.
All in all we had an enjoyable day and managed 43 QSOs and 24 multipliers, giving us a score of 227,856. Amazingly our best QSO was the first station we worked, at 564 km. Next backpackers will be on 6th August from 2pm.