Today I had some free time with my wife and we decided to
go for a nice hike on our mountains.
All prepared and set in minutes and we both jumped in the car.
WX was cloudy and quite cold: 14°C.
When we reached the top and I mounted the antenna the sun came out
to warm us a little bit.
Unfortunately my mini 60 antenna analyzer gave me bad news:
the swr was close to 10:1 and I did not understand how could it be possible
to achieve that result with a monoband vertical 1/4 lambda with 4 calculated radials.
I tried shortening and moving and whatsoever but nothing changed.
Something was not working. So I checked first the banana connector and
inverted the polarity: it was the first time I used it and the colors were inverted!
So, after that I was able to call in SSB for a short test.
No one was responding me so I suddenly switched to CW.
I made the fist contact with G4ZAO/P but i was not able to finish the qso
because some other hams (one with digital modes) started to call on the
same frequency and even if I started telling them PSE QRL, they went on.
So I had to start over again and made the first true contact with IK2LEY.
Was very happy to contact him because I think that it’s not fun in SOTA
without an IK2LEY contact!
Then I had some italian and german contact, then Poland and then Switerland.
Was then time to pack everything up.
It was a good activation and my wife slept well. HI !!
