Seven teams braved the Torbay DF qualifier.

Both signals were heard at the start, Woodbury Common, and soon all teams were off .

Station A, G0BTH on 1920kHz had a bearing of 313deg and was located 12.4km from the start due south of Goffins Farm on the edge of Exeter with no real clue that some accessible thick wood was there on the map.

Station B, G3WHR on 1960kHz was located 7.2km due north of the start on the edge of the A30. Colin found this one – some maps show the footpath, some don’t.

The stations were only 8km apart, so no great road race, only DF.

The map is shown below:

All teams seemed to have trouble this year for one reason or other and the results indicate the hard time they had.

Most teams then meet at the “£6 all day” Chinese in Exeter to exchange how it all went!

From the transmitter operators' viewpoint, little was heard of the teams until gone 3pm and both operators thought the DF hunters had gone to the other site and the people currently on site were at their second station and so kept a low profile to keep the event going.

Both stations used about 500m of wire and are shown below:

Station A

X marks operator hidden under camouflage netting, all wires had earth stake at end. The east west arms ran above a boggy little stream.

Station B

X marks operator hidden between the field fence and the earth bank of the footpath. The triangle marks Fred the dummy’s position to put off DF hunters entry to the operator – seemed to work

The antenna ran at low level along the top of the hedge – hidden from view of the path – and then connected to the top wire of the fence to allow signal to get to the high wire over the trees and then back to wire strung along the opposite side of the path and finally connected to the top fence wire there. This seemed to make everything “hot” with RF and no real sense of where the Tx was.

The Tx operator reported that the antenna wire started to move away from him late in the event and he had to hold on to stop it disappearing. Then had to retune to maintain match. May explain why Andy went straight in when he arrived? Glad he did!

Thanks to all the teams that joined in for a fun day. It makes all the preparation worthwhile!

Paul Clark G0BTH