9 teams gathered at Lane End for the start of the annual Mid-Thames Triple night DF event, and were rewarded with a mild, dry night and plenty of signals. The three transmitters were heard at the first transmission at 1750 hrs but only Graham Phillips, G3XTZ, was sufficiently confident of his bearings to leave the start before approximate bearings were given, with competitors having difficulty with the night-time sky-wave effects, particularly on transmitter B.

Steve Stone, manning transmitter A was located 16kms south-west from the start at Checkendon. Given that this was the furthest transmitter from the supper location the organisers expected most competitors to make this their initial tx, but in practice only Graham Jones went to this site first, finding Steve Stone at just past 8pm. Steve’s exact location for those who didn't find him was NGR 674825, just off the SE corner of the field. About 20m from the footpath and 300m from the best access from the NE. He was situated in a small clump of bushes, so should have been easy to find with a simple aerial straight out from the hide and high up in the trees. According to Steve ‘it didn't look much in daylight, but at night it's always harder’.

The remaining competitors split between transmitters B and C as their first tx. Transmitter B (Roger Shepherd) was located close to the intersection of the A404 and M4 in Ockwells Park to the South of Maidenhead, 15km south south-east from the start. Tests with a barbed wire fence [adjacent to a ditch of nasty stuff] the day before had shown that this gave insufficient signal strength to reach the start. It transpired that the battery on this transmitter was less than perfect – subsequent tests [on Sunday] showed that the transmitter was unable to generate more than 1 watt into a 50ohm load. Given the location there were few options for aerials so a quarter-wave aerial was employed on the night which proved to be fairly simple to df into once competitors had found the right vicinity. One team got it completely wrong and approached from across a field and had to traverse the aforementioned ditch – the language would have been colourful had it not been dark. Just imagine what it would have been like had the fence worked :>) Alan Simmons and Geoff Foster were first into this site at 1920hrs and this good start was to prove instrumental in them achieving good results for the overall competition. Roy was the only team not to find this station, he was very close for the last 10-20 minutes of the competition but was probably denied the result due to the low power being radiated at the time.

Transmitter C (Peter Lisle and Dan Andrews) was located 9km south-east of the start on an escarpment overlooking cock marsh south of the river from Bourne End. Despite this having a fairly simple aerial competitors found this hard to df into with the signal being picked up and re-radiated from a fence to the south of the site. Many competitors also expended a fair amount of energy climbing up and down the escarpment, and further energy accessing the site from distant locations, with no-one arriving along the easiest southern access path. The first ‘clump’ of four competitors arrived here at 1920hrs but did not find the site until 2000hrs, which proved too much of a handicap to recover from.

Alan Simmons’ new team member Emma found the aerial on his first site (site B) and his other team member Greg continued the good teamwork by tracking the aerial into site C at 2030, inadvertently assisting Geoff Foster to also find the Tx. Alan and Geoff made it across to Tx A by 2215 and Alan ‘pipped’ Geoff into the site by a couple of minutes. Bill Pechey meanwhile made good a 25 minute handicap from his first site to nearly catch Alan and Geoff - arriving just 5 minutes behind them. Graham Phillips very nearly pulled off an amazing triple, making up most of his 40 minute deficit from site C and arriving just 100mtrs away from site A at the close of the contest.

A good supper was held at the Three Horseshoes in Flackwell Heath after which Alan Simmons was awarded the Eric Mollart Memorial trophy for he and his teams’ sterling efforts on the night.

Peter Lisle, Roger Shepherd and Steve Stone