That’s not higher end… there are people with many 60ft Versatowers on trailers with loads of antennas. I can’t remember which group had 8x 17ele for 2m beaming out to Germany etc. 4x 17ele for 2m on another mast beaming for France/Spain and 2x 9ele for the UK and EI and almost as much again for 70cms. That’s high end.
The drone is a good fun but the most important things were the fridge to keep the beer and milk cold and the kettle to make tea. And the non-stop feed of bacon rolls
We should be out for 2m in September…
Edit: This is highend… an 11ele Yagi for 4m on a windup 60ft mast. Before I was involved. It’s a rubbish photo as it comes from a lower-res video.
@g4yss. John, here’s a photo of this weekend’s setup for the September 2m contest. Same place as VHF FD but we only had 7 williing victims for the ensuing monsoon conditions on the Sunday.
2x 17ele long Yagis (5 lambda long). We’ve been playing with some “how high should my Yagi be” software and based on the ground slope for our site and so had them lower than you’d expect. No shortage of F, ON and PA stations to be worked when they got around to beaming North. In the evening conditions improved a little and we worked OZ with ease.
The SOTA angle? The hill behind the tents is the Knockendurrick and Bengray GM/SS-238 is 2km beyond it. Also I was going to bag Pibble Hill GM/SS-232 on Sunday, but the biblical rain levels disuaded me of that idea.
You certainly are putting some effort and resources in this VHF’ing. We just took delivery of a 2m; 7-ely beam and we think that’s massive. We had a go with it in Sunday’s contest for the first hour or so and got 14, three of which were in France.
The handy nearby ASL was 152m but AGL only 2.5m! Wonder how that works out over locally flat ground? It slopes upwards towards the north. My son (and occasionally me) just do it for pleasure and an excuse to play radio. There is something special about VHF that I like. We did notice that difference between 7-ely and the previous 3-ely but we’re just playing at it. The 7-ely gives us a storage problem. It’ll have to live on the side of my fence.
Off to SARS now. Another silent key sale, I’m afraid.
If you spread out the costs of gear over the years it’s buttons, just that you have spend an awful lot of buttons in one go then nothing for many years. Most of the costs now amount to a liquid thank you present to our farmer and 25L of petrol for the generator. Occasionally there are repairs, one of the tents needs some new poles and rip fixing. Plus the cost of transporting all the gear 125miles from here down to Dumfries & Galloway and bringing it back.
Sometimes the WX is lovely… before the monsoon came!
