With one failure and one success so far on this trip, I was hoping that this Summit so far West from my home area would be another win. Everything was looking good following the Success at watch croft the previous afternoon.
We had a few delays setting off for the summit and pushed the time out twice, but I was determined that we would get it done.
When we finally arrived, and got prepared for the hike to the summit, it was already dark, and I had read earlier reports and warned my activation buddies that the terrain was going to be a little tricky.
We headed up following previous O/S routes, and passed some home made signs that warned “No access to Trig Point”. Not to be defeated and having a lifetime of not doing as I’m told behind me, we pressed on regardless, only to be ambushed near the gate to the radio station by a landowner in a 4x4 who became very animated about there being no access, and what the hell were we doing there… “We’re here to work on a radio antenna” I replied… Technically not a complete fabrication, however any illusion that we were there in a formal capacity, was made a little less opaque by the presence of two Chihuahua’s in a shopping bag, and some pink Ugg boots of one of my fellow activatees. However this bluff appeared at least in the short term to have caused enough confusion for the landowner to stand baffled point in the direction of the radio tower with a grunt, “It’s up there, we get a lot of strange people trying to go up there”.
The gates for the access road to the tower seem to be no longer attached to any posts for now at least, either having been pulled down or fallen down, and the barbed fence to the trig point looks like it has breaks in places, or has been trampled down presumably by those “Strange people”, that go up there. Clearly this route has a fair amount of footfall given the challenges accessing through the deep gorse.
We managed about 30 minutes of peace to set up antenna in what must have been 40kts of wind, it was unforgiving, I had around 4 tumbles on the ground around the trig point, there are some deep gulleys and holes between the rocks around the tumulus, It would not be an exageration to say they are pretty hazardous, I stepped into one that was knee deep, a broken leg is a real possibility here. The strong wind and a 15kilo bergan did me no favours, and i did a fair bit of scrambling.
Fortunately my fellow activatee, non-ham friend, was more agile than me and was able to get the antenna up and braced despite the strong wind. It was during this time that it both started to drizzle and the landowner returned shouting over the fence, asking who we were working for, but unfortunately the strong wind made it difficult to hold a conversation, and he gave up and left again. We carried on, and spotted, but try as we might, there was no responses on 20m, 40m, or 80m.
I briefly managed to break into a net on 80m where it was confirmed my signal wasn’t great and I had “RF in the Audio”, not something i’ve experienced before, but I’m wondering if my substitute mic, ordered in a hurry earlier in the week may not be as well matched to the radio as I had initially thought. Or whether one of the tumbles I took gave the radio a knock, I don’t know for sure. But we gave it a good hour of trying before having to leave defeated (for now).
I am home now, and will do some tests on the radio with the original mic and a new cable, to determine if that is the issue before my next visit, I also intend to look into some of the suggestions i’ve already been given for more appropriate antenna for the smaller sites such as this. Certainly the lack of anchor points meant the G5RV was closer to the wet granite boulders than I’d have liked.
I guess this trip has taught me one thing, getting to the top of the hill is only a small part of the challenge.
Sorry it didn’t work out…
I activated this recently. The Trig point is on open access land, so you have every right to access this land, via one of the public footpaths. It was a bit wet for me.
The mast played complete havoc with my VHF radio I had to rely on HF
Did you have a common mode choke on the G5RV just before the radio ? I suspect this is RF reflected back into the radio and up into the mic from the antenna.
An End Few Half wave would be a much easier setup on a summit like this. I used an end fed and setup quite far from the trig and the dam transmitter
I didn’t have a choke on it. It’s never been a problem before, however the radio cage was sitting on the wet granite rock, and the microphone was a temporary cheapo substitute to the original Yaesu mic, bought in a rush following a cable failure earlier in the week. I had a feeling that may have played a major part in the problem, like you said RF being picked up by the low quality mic. I got away with it at the Watch Croft Activation, but something different in the setup at this location made it more of a problem.
It may be the cheaper Mic with less optimal filtering of unwanted frequencies. Or it could be the antenna or its surroundings causing more RF to be reflected, with less optimal SWR.
Either way a common mode choke is a must on all my antennas when doing SOTA as conditions vary and it is what I would try to solve this problem.
Tim - G5OLD
I’ve never been a big fan of the G5RV, it’s the UK ham’s favourite dummy load! Or you do need to rig them well for them to work well. For portable use there are many antennas which work better, are small and weigh less. Looking at the picture the feed point seems far too low. This means you will have excess ladder line laying on the ground which is a no-no. It needs be supported above the ground.
The antenna you have is better than the antenna you’d like to have but I’d be looking at swapping it for either coax centre fed dipoles with links. Or some kind of off-centre fed dipole or an EFHW with a match. With a 7m pole you can get the feed up high and 10m of RG174 will weigh less than 30-odd ft of ladder line on a G5RV for dipoles. If you use links you can dump the tuner and save a load of weight. If you make an EFHW and make your own 1:64 unun then don’t forget many designs you see are for <20W max and as your 857 could do 100W, make sure the unun is designed for such power. You can make an adjustable manual match for the EFHW which would also weigh a lot less than the ATU.
As for never needing a common mode choke… Yaesu’s FT 8x7 family of radios were remarkably bullet proof for RF pickup and if you never needed one before you probably only need one because the cheap microphone is not properly shielded. If it’s the cable that has failed on your 857 mic, then you can buy a replacement from Yaesu UK. You don’t need to replace the whole unit. But there was a batch of 8x7 microphones than became dodgy / faulty when used in damp conditions ISTR, a few on here had them fail. If you know someone locally with an 8x7 radio you can check your microphone on their cable to confirm if you need a full replacement or just a cable.
Hopefully you can get the mic sorted and make yourself some more portable friendly antennas so we can see you out activating soon.
Indeed, mine played up on a couple of times on GM/SS activations. Had to shout very loudly into it to get any output. ISTR it was on the last summit of the day each time after rather wet activations on other summits earlier in the day. The mic was fine when it had dried out. I bought a spare mic and got to carrying that when it was wet… just in case. though I have never had cause to use it. I now take extra precautions to keep the mic dry.
Thanks, there’s a lot of good points there that I can start investigating, I’ll be doing some experimenting back in my local hills over the coming months, using various different configurations. I have ordered a replacement cable for the mic, we’ll see if that fixes it, I had very strong suspicions that the mic was to blame, it was a gamble getting it, and it was the only one I could get shipped next day to a pickup point in Cornwall. If it does turn out to be the microphone then I shall replace that and keep the spare cable. My entire setup needs some weight reduction, so over the coming months I shall be working on that, both with different antenna options, and also with the Manpack system, hoping to change from copper tubing to something lighter.
An interesting point that may have contributed to the difficulty was that there was apparently a significant Geo Magnetic Storm on the 31st December / 1st Jan, and propogation to all bands was reported as poor, other issues considered this would have been more than a slight hinderance.
73’s Glenn