We had great weather for all of Saturday, and Sunday rain held off until 3PM packing up time. Radio conditions were quite good, 40m held up well but 80m became very quiet during the day as usual. We collected around 500 contacts on 40m and 400 on 80m.

CW operators had great fun and they really enjoyed refreshing their latent skills.

During setup we experienced a very strange fault on the 80m dipole, it had a persistently high SWR for no apparent reason. We finally concluded it must be caused by some of the antenna still being wired in to the switchboard at the clubrooms, and changed the whole antenna.

There was another incident earlier in the day when one of the field day radios got run over by a truck on Highway one in Belfast, (please do not ask why it was in the road) and a substitute radio was donated by 3APB. He also brought along his home brew QRP rig to run his own portable station.

One of the hazards of the site was the deep EQ chasms in the field, quite tricky to see in the dark. I don’t think we lost anyone.

At least we had no natural disasters this year, hooray.

Thanks to this year’s team – Brian Ramage ZL2BAT, Rod 3ROD, Aidan 3APB, Rob 3RX, Rory Deans ZL3HB, Geoff Cooke ZL2TGC, Richard Smart ZL4FZ, David O'Malley ZL3DO,

Paul Layt ZL3TX, Graham ZL3NK, Kelvin Barnsdale ZL3KB.

Also many thanks to AREC for the loan of the trucks, and the CCC farm manager for access. No cows were harmed in the running of this event (except I had a beef sandwich).

Top left. ZL3KB.

Top right. All the vehicles.

Bottom left ZL3HB, ZL2BAT and ZL2TGC (should we get picnic basket out yet?)