The 'Story of GZ7V' starts after the photos below :-

For the October 2000 CQ WW SSB Contest the GM7V team travelled to SHETLAND - a separate 'multiplier' for CQ WW scoring.  The operators of this Multi-Multi entry were Chris Tran GM3WOJ, Stewart Cooper GM4AFF (GM0F), Jim Atkinson GM4TXX, and Keith Kerr GM4YXI.     The Shetland Islands have IOTA reference EU-012, IOSA reference SH1, WAB HU27 and locator IP90 - they are reached by a 14 hour, 220 mile sea crossing from Aberdeen to Lerwick, by P.and O. Scottish Ferries.

We used a brand-new prefix - our callsign was   GZ7V   Thanks to the RSGB and the UK Licensing Authority, the R.A., holders of UK Special Contest Callsigns can now use the prefix GZ or MZ when operating from Shetland in major contests.  The 'Z' refers to the alternative name for Shetland which is 'Zetland'.  

GZ7V QSL cards are via our manager : Edwin Musto ZS5BBO, PO Box 211032, Bluff 4036, South Africa.    Cards can be sent via the SARL Bureau, but may take a long time - a direct QSL is best.

Thanks to Jim Fisher GM0NAI, Gavin Taylor GM0GAV, Martin Gill 2M0ALS, Allan Duncan GM4ZUK, Ian Millar GM7RKD, Hans Hassel GM4SSA, Frank Sinclair GM4SWU, Linda and Bertie Pearson and Magnus for their help and support before and during the event.

Some photos, then the full story of GZ7V during the contest :-

20 Oct - We are on our way!

GZ7V October 2000 - the story - by Chris Tran GM3WOJ

The prefix GZ was originally requested by Shetland amateurs in the 1980's, and was about to be issued then when some amateurs on the Isle of Wight complained that if Shetland got its own prefix, then so should they - laughable, but unfortunately this denied the Shetland Islands the use of a separate prefix for all these years.  Try travelling to Shetland if you are not convinced that they should have a separate prefix from the rest of the UK.   In 1999, Rob Ferguson GM3YTS of the GM DX Group raised this issue again, planning to survey opinions amongst Shetland resident amateurs, to assess support for a possible separate prefix. 

Rob mentioned this to me when I told him we were thinking about a contest expedition to Shetland for CQ WW SSB October 2000, so I decided to ask the R.A. (Radiocommunication Agency – our UK licensing authority) if we could use the callsign GS7V for our Shetland trip. The ‘GS’ prefix is normally used by Scottish Club stations e.g. our normal club call GM2MP is usually used as GS2MP. I did not think it was likely that ‘GZ’ would be possible, so GS was the next best thing – anything other than GM to try to make other contesters aware that we were not on the Scottish mainland. In February 2000 I applied to the R.A. for the use of GS7V – as the months passed with no real progress, I decided to advertise our callsign as GS2MP, which we would definitely be able to use. Thanks to intervention from the RSGB HF Contest Committee, and excellent co-operation from Aaron Abiaw of the R.A., we were proud to be issued with the callsign GZ7V just 8 days before the contest. We departed for Shetland (from the Aberdeen P&O Scottish Ferries ferry terminal) on Friday October 20^th 2000, towing the GM4AFF 60’ mobile tower and with the ink still drying on the GZ7V licence document. I was really looking forward to visiting Shetland – my late mother was born there in 1914, but I’d never visited the islands.

The ferry ‘St Clair’ carried us (me and my daughter Carrie) to Shetland, along with open ‘pens’ carrying sheep on the car-deck !   It was a rough crossing – looking out of the cabin in the middle of the night I saw an awesome seascape with mountainous waves (well they looked mountainous to me!) We arrived in Lerwick harbour at about 0800 on the Saturday morning, just as dawn was breaking. As we moved up the coast I realised how thinly populated Shetland is – only a few forlorn lights were visible every few km along the coast. After a morning looking around Lerwick, a fairly spread out town with many stone-built houses and a busy fishing harbour, I travelled to our rented QTH near Eshaness. One of the best things about this Northern part of the Shetland ‘mainland’ is that there are few roads near to the coastline, therefore no holiday homes blighting the landscape. The coastline is really spectacular – eroded basalt cliffs with many offshore natural arches and caves on small islands, and many jagged rocks just below the surface. The house was a 3-bedroom bungalow, owned by Linda and Bertie Pearson, with oil-fired central heating which was essential in late October. The 39-mile drive from Lerwick took about an hour when towing the mobile tower.

After a couple of days sight-seeing, I set up a 10MHz inverted-vee on a 20’ pole lashed to a fencepost, and made a few QSOs as GM3WOJ/P on CW. I’d heard how good a DX band 10MHz is, but I was not impressed - it seemed full of stations signing /QRP and sending at 5wpm – a nightmare! Probably it was just the wrong time of day, but I did listen at different times. The following morning I shortened the antenna to resonate on 18MHz, phoned a friend to check what the band-edges were (!), then worked 300 CW stations in 2 hours from all around the world - I had to work split at one point – 17m is a good DX band ! On the Tuesday before the contest I visited the GB3LER Beacon site 2km S of Lerwick, and removed the GB3LER 50.064MHz beacon and antenna for testing – these have now been re-installed at a new site by Frank GM4SWU and this beacon is back to being a really useful auroral indicator for European 6m operators.

On the Wednesday just before CQ WW SSB, Jim and Stewart arrived with the van full of equipment, and we started to set up antennas as soon as possible, worried that the weather might get even worse – it was difficult working in a constant 30-40 mph wind, with passing rain-showers. On the Wednesday evening I managed to damage my car (no alcohol was involved, just tiredness and carelessness) – this caused us a lot of extra problems we could have done without. The wind seemed to drain your motivation. It’s surprising how important good wet-weather equipment is on a Dxpedition – for example my rubber Wellington boots sprung a leak, and I had to work with one cold wet foot every time I went outside – it seems obvious now but I don’t know why I didn’t just go to the local shop (10 miles away) and buy another pair !

The land around the QTH was ideal for our antennas, and we had been given permission by the brother of the house owner to put up antennas. The ground was peat, and very damp – ideal for LF antennas. On Thursday Keith GM4YXI arrived to complete the team, and we had all the 6 antennas and 4 stations ready for use by about 1700 on Friday – this was a strange feeling for the GM7V team – we are usually trying to resonate antennas at 2300 on the Friday evening, using arc-lamps in the rain and wind.

Stations/antennas :-    

160m/15m TS-950SDX + Alpha 91B + 160m dipole + 15m 4ele Cushcraft yagi on a 35’ pole.

80m/10m TS-950SDX + Alpha 89 + 80m Vertical + 28MHz 5ele YO6.55 yagi on a 35’ pole.

40m IC-775DSP + Ameritron AL1500x + Vertical with 2 elevated radials.

20m FT-1000MP + GM3WOJ 4CX1500B amp. + 3ele YO6.55 yagi at 60’.

All antennas (except for the 160m dipole) were fed with Andrews LDF4-50A Heliax.   Keith GM4YXI had manufactured 2 radial mats (alleged by ON4UN to give up to 6 dB improvement in performance) for the 2 verticals – the efficiency of these mats was difficult to assess under the temporary GZ7V set-up, but they were surprisingly easy to install and remove.

With the exception of the 15m yagi, all the antennas belong to me and were tested during August/September, then dismantled into as few parts as possible to save assembly time – the 5ele 10m yagi for example was transported as 7 parts – the 2 boom sections + 5 fully-assembled elements.

As we were assembling the antennas and stations, we were thinking about the ‘tear-down’ on the Monday after the contest – we had to check-in for the ferry at Lerwick by 1700z, which with the van now towing the tower meant that we had to leave the GZ7V QTH by 1500z, which with dawn not until about 0800 meant that everything had to be dismantled and packed up in 7 hours.  We made the assumption that it would probably be blowing a gale and raining so we were concerned that we could do everything on time. If we go back to Shetland I would try to stay until the Tuesday to avoid this time pressure. On the Friday we put up a 450’ Beverage antenna then after discussion took it back down again, worried that it would be one job too many to have to dismantle it on the Monday.

The contest started well, with fairly good conditions and the GZ prefix creating extra demand. During the early hours of Sunday morning however, the aurora arrived – we went outside to see a fantastically dramatic scene – the pale green aurora surging overhead, the Eshaness lighthouse sweeping the sky just a mile to the west of us, and to the south-east the pulsing orange glow of the Sullom Voe Oil Terminal flare stack – amazing to see.

At about 0400z 70mph winds severed the 160m dipole and broke the top 10’ off the 80m vertical. Even with 15 guy-ropes, the 60’ mobile tower was struggling in the gale. We went outside to try to repair at least the 160m dipole, but after 3 attempts we gave up. It’s easy to say "what – 3 grown men could not repair a simple wire dipole ?" but the reality was grim – it was pitch dark, blowing a severe gale which had wrapped the feeder around one of the guy-ropes, and the freezing rain had started – driving horizontally against our backs like someone standing pointing a hose at you. As dawn came we looked at the damaged 80m vertical and discovered that the new ‘riveted’ design used by me, copying Force-12, was NOT a good idea – the top section had broken off because of metal fatigue just above a riveted joint, and it was a major repair – if I has used our normal ‘slotted end + hose-clip’ method, we could have repaired it fairly quickly I’m sure – another lesson learned the hard way. We were very disappointed to miss out on many QSOs and Mults by losing both 160m and 80m at a crucial time.

The wind was still very strong on the Sunday afternoon, so we stopped for a while and with the help of visitors we lowered the 60’ tower to about 25’, which made us all feel a lot safer. Monday was a dry calm day, with weak sunshine – ideal for dismantling and packing away everything – our worries about time were groundless (however we did have only 4 antennas left by then !)

We finished the contest with 8000 QSOs for 11.6 Million points – the aurora and antenna damage prevented us reaching our targets, but we were satisfied that we had done our best under the circumstances. The car-crash definitely affected my normal approach to contesting. Ironically we maybe also suffered by being the first-ever GZ station – the last two Internet ‘Announced operations’ lists had us wrongly listed as Scotland not Shetland, which was unfortunate – I had e-mailed to try to prevent this. I think that future contest expeditions will fare better in terms of identification world-wide. I wonder if our UBN will suffer a lot by being logged as GM7V ?! It’s surprising how many ‘casual’ contesters don’t know that Shetland is a separate multiplier – there must be some historical reason for Shetland and African Italy being the only 2 (I think) non-DXCC entities that are separate CQ WW mults, but I don’t know what the reason is.

So – will we be GZ7V next year ? - probably not - for a variety of reasons, but I know of another GM friend who is hoping to be SOAB for CQ WW CW 2001, and I’m sure that the GZ prefix will be used a lot over the next few years. I will definitely be GZ7V again though at some stage.  A big 'thanks' to Stewart, Jim and Keith for helping put GZ7V on the air.

Shetland is a wonderful place to visit – the Shetlanders are very friendly people, and helped us tremendously, especially when things were going badly. The scenery and weather are spectacular and wild, and I’ll definitely be going back in the future.

CQ WW SSB 2000 – GZ7V Contest expedition – Claimed totals :

Call: GZ7V  Country: Shetlands   Mode: SSB Category: Multi Multi      Zone: 14

BAND     QSOs  QSO PTS PTS/QSO ZONES COUNTRIES

160        231        250       1.08        9          47

80         396        560        1.41      13          58

40       1053       1539        1.46      24          96

20       2219       4111        1.85      38         136

15       2210       4462        2.02      39         136

10       1815       3980        2.19      38         143

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Totals  7924      14902       1.88     161         616  =>  11,578,854 pts

Operator List: Chris Tran GM3WOJ, Jim Atkinson GM4TXX, Keith Kerr GM4YXI, Stewart Cooper GM4AFF

I hope you enjoyed the story of GZ7V !  (especially you guys who were on Caribbean islands !)

73  Chris Tran   GM3WOJ/GM7V  gm3woj@talk21.com   Visit  www.qsl.net/gm3woj/