I am back on the air with a temporary station, seven miles away from my previous QTH. We are now living in a hamlet of 40 homes close to Kirkbymoorside in North Yorkshire, twenty miles as the crow flies, to the outskirts of York.
On Friday I rigged up a temporary station and an antenna attached to our summerhouse. This will have to suffice until the builder comes in a month or two to build me a shack inside the double garage. The bungalow we are in is much smaller than the previous home as we’ve downsized, so there isn’t room for a shack in the home itself. The plot we are on though is quite substantial - 211 feet X 75 feet according to my measurements, so there is plenty of room for antennas in time, and there is plenty of gardening to do also…
I’m using my Yaesu FT-710 into a 66 feet off centre fed dipole as an inverted vee at the moment with the centre at 8m AGL fed with Mini 8 coax. A Life’s a Breeze HD pole is fastened to the summer house with bungees. I have a laptop for computer logging and the first QSOs on SOTA made last night were with F/DK3RN/P, M0PJE/P, MW0IDX/P, OK/G5LSI.
This morning I worked Manuel EA2DT who was not on a summit but operating from a Lighthouse as part of ILLW weekend. Manuel told me he has not been chasing much on SOTA this year due to worldwide travel and other business interests!
So I’m back chasing SOTA again, when I have time, as there is such a lot to do on the property as it hasn’t been lived in for nearly two years. The antenna is usable with the internal tuner in the rig on 40m, 20m, 10m, 6m and 4m. 60m works as well, and surprisingly the internal ATU matches that as well!
I really miss the hobby, so it’s great to be back on the air again. My locator square is now IO94NG, previously I was in IO94OF. .
I will be activating again here in Spain within the next few days. I’ll post an Alert in the next couple of days. It goes without saying that I’d be well pleased if we manage a comtact.
Nice, Phil. Great to read that you have moved some steps forward and settled a bit. Looking forward to hearing you here and there from your new home. Enjoy!
I can sympathise as we’ve been in a similar situation over the last 18 months - I now have a working indoor shack but I do need to sort some more permanent antennas. Only 12 activator points in the log this year …
Good luck with the building and decorating work, I hope it goes well and leaves some time for the radio.
