2010 John Moyle Memorial Field Day

Over the weekend 20th & 21st March 2010 is the John Moyle Memorial Field Day contest. Our club call VK3ER will be activated from Mt. Cowley in the Otway Ranges near Lorne on the Great Ocean Road.

At this stage some of the team will travel to Mount Cowley on the Friday and set up a portable station capable of operating on bands from 6m - 23cm. If there are members interested in attending and operating on HF please let one of the team members know soon.

Our reason for traveling so far away is to take advantage of the extra points available on the VHF/UHF bands, Mt Cowley is about 120km from the CBD making most contacts on VHF/UHF into Melbourne worth 20 points. If you live in Blackburn look at the attached image from Radio Mobile you will see that even with a modest station at each end using 15w and an antenna gain of 1.85dBd at a height of 2m above ground it would be easy to work the club station 136.7km away. Added to that the fact that on 2m VK3ER will be using around 100w of TX power into an antenna gain of about 15dBd at 6.0m then it will be even easier to work the station on 2m. For 70cm it would be similar so start preparing your home station now!

Club members and friends are welcome to come along and either visit or join in by assisting with the activation of the club call VK3ER.

If you are having difficulty hearing some of the distant stations try taking a drive to a more prominent location, you will be amazed at the difference it makes. Or if you have a new antenna contests like this are a great way to test them out.

There will be quite a few stations operating portable and like us they will be looking for stations to work mostly on VHF/UHF. To make the contest less boring stations are permitted to re-work every 3 hours I have added an explanation of the scoring and re-work windows, times are in UTC.

Contest start time Saturday 01:00z contest finish Sunday 00:59z

The re-work period can be used to your advantage, for instance, if you were to contact stations at 03:55 then you are allowed to re-work them no earlier than five minutes later as the clock has entered a new re-work block. If you intend to use this method I suggest you allow some extra time because the bands become very busy just before and after the re-work crossover point. The contact exchange should be: Call sign, signal report, Location and exchange number starting from 001/H "home station" or P "portable station". On VHF/UHF both SSB and FM listen on any of the designated calling frequencies, if you don't know them the easiest way to start would be to call on 146.500 and the contest stations will ask you to QSY off the calling frequency and from there will be able to sort out what other bands you have.

If you are interested in paying us a visit or would like to come and help we would be happy to see you.

To see our location on Google Earth Link (assuming you have Google Earth installed on your computer)

Club member Mike VK3AVV has written a contest logging program 'VK Contest Log (VKCL)' used by many contesters, give it a run this weekend. You will find the program at this link VK Contest Log.

Hope to work plenty of you over the weekend. For information about the contest all the rules can be found on the WIA website under “contests”

Cheers, Jack VK3WWW