This was the first event in the portable calendar to be reinstated after the outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease. Barley one month’s notice could be given and large areas of the countryside remained closed. Even so, a total of 233 groups, evenly split between the Open and Restricted sections, took to the fields and were rewarded with fair weather and some brisk competition.

Conditions on the HF bands were generally a little improved over last year. The leading Open section scores were up by about 15% as operators took full advantage of easterly openings on 20m and 15m, running scores of JAs at a time. For once , the All-Asian contest proved an asset rather than a liability. (Note that it is perfectly acceptable to work stations participating in other contests and to send them the information that they require, as long as the RSGB contest exchange is sent as well and any number received is correctly logged.) No such good fortune for those without beams and amplifiers, however. Restricted section scores, always heavily reliant upon LF conditions were, if anything, down a trifle.

Logs were of a high standard with fewer errors detected than in the 2000 event. Where points were lost, this was almost always due to mistakes in receiving callsigns, the most common problem being the confusion of similar-sounding letters: ‘M’ and ‘N’, ‘S’ and ‘F’ and so on. It may be slower to use full phonetics but it is certainly more accurate. Probably for the first time ever, all logs were submitted in electronic form, either disk or by e-mail. This was a godsend to the adjudicator, who was relieved of the chore of typing paper entries into the computer. Even a log which is not in the recognised format (and there were a couple of these) can be manipulated with the comparative ease in a word processor.

In the Open section, Lichfield ARS stormed into the lead by a margin of around 30% from G3TBK/P, with last year’s winners, the Bristol Contest Group, G6YB/P, in the third place. The average QSO rate at G3WAS/P was 77 per hour!