Hi Guys,
It was fun. No need to rename it. Just set up on your garden (yard) or on your balcony. That qualifies as a back yard. I know there may be translation difficulties of the term as used in ZL and VK so just take it more generally. So long as you do not break your isolation rules it could be a park across the street for example.
Note it has to be set up just prior to operating as if it were SOTA. Instead of 0000 UTC start, in deference to EU lagging behind, just go for a 10:00 am Berlin time start next Saturday. Two hours. Work everyone you can on as many bands as you can.
I have a beautiful garden down my 8th floor apartment but nowadays I’m not allowed to go down there and put my aerial.
Instead I shall try putting an EF antenna hanging from my tiny balcony and see what happens.
I just wait to have a good weather to be out in the balcony and try CQing or scanning the bands to chase some activity. Operation strictly running on batteries as for the regular SOTA…
Hi all
Third rainy day … but my project does not fall apart. This leaves me time to improve the future installation.
This time that the goat do not have on the ground !
If other stations are ready let us know that we can contact you
73 Éric
Here’s hoping your weather is improving. Here we have had sunsshine for the last week and it is forecast for the next week as well. That’s sounds great, but over the last few days we have had icy-cold winds, but thankfully they are now gone and the temperatures are rising again.
Rather than have lots of rulkes and restrictions, I suggest we do as the lads “down-under” did and keep the Hg/HbOTA (or EUROPEAN BYOTA as I call it) as simple as possible - chose a 2-hour window and as many people as possible take the gear out that they would normally use for a SOTA activation into the garden (or onto the balcony), get on whatever band(s) they think is best on whichever their favorite mode is and just enjoy themselves - post a report afterwards to the off-topic section of this reflector.
I would avoid a day/time when a large contest is on.
73 Ed.
P.S. Assistance (spotting) using whatever tool the people wish - a text chat room would probably be best but otherwise simply use the DXClusters, like special event stations do.
Today midday I saw a good weather in my window. I jumped and grabbed my portable gear.
Once in the balcony I decided my 40-15m EFHW was too long to deploy hanging in front of my neighbour’s windows, and I decided to cut a new 10m wire to try 20m only.
I trimmed it quickly to get a perfect 1:1 match (I was a bit afraid of my thick metal rail near the antenna but I used a fishpole to bend the wire outwards 2 meters apart.
I started the rig and CQ on 14.060 CW a bit. No replies…
I scanned the band and soon found 3 stations that I logged in a row:
LY300GAON, OH5STAYHOME and AM8WARD (hey, Canary Isl is just opposite direction hidden by my apartment!!)
Okay, I stayed a bit more calling CQ: see what I got with 5w:
Nice HbOTA activation dear Ignacio @EA2BD
I’ll be QRV for an HgOTA this afternoon, please look at the cluster !
I’ll self spot F5JKK/P CQ HbOTA, arround 7.038 if free.
Also QRV DMR TG-973.
73 Éric
Hello,
Today started on 40m at 14:30 Z after one spot on DXSummit and one call on DMR TG-973.
I was using the Blue Pacific P1 vertical at 3m up with 3 elevated radial.
Was Called by Christophe @ON6ZQ, he give me 339 he was 579/599 !
No many takers, find on the band S50EARTH and DL4TO/P (GMA), here the RBN report.
let me help you closing this thread by bringing it closer to 100 posts.
Yesterday I set up my SOTA station on the balcony to make some MSK144 tests on 144MHz. Quite successful however I didn’t make any QSO. That wasn’t my intention anyway since I have been struggling with MSK for a while and now got the problems sorted out. With a small setup and located in a valley in JO50, DL, OK, I, F, G, OZ, SP, and PA MS signals were successfully decoded.
I’m sorry to say that my HF setup at my JO50 QTH does not comply with the HbOTA rules. It is indeed SOTA style with a wire attached to a glass fibre pole, but this is a permanent setup. Whenever I’m here, I just pull out the pole on the balcony, get me a beer, sit down in the shack and let the remote ATU at the feedpoint do its work.
As I said, only for testing and rx purposes. And look closely, I polarised the VHF mobile whip horizontally to get the best rx results. This setup was temporarily and complied with the HbOTA rules.
On MS SOTA activations I use 2x5 ele DK7ZB.
The vertical pole is for 80 - 10m, for 160m I occasionally add another horizontal wire to make it an L-antenna.
I must apologise Eric, that I didn’t get on the air on Saturday as I had hoped - I have a definite problem in the fact that I am getting RF back into the rig (a problem that I thought I had solved) - the resulting audio is “raspy” and difficult to understand. Even worse when I turn the DYC-817 dynamic speech processor on. Until I can solve the RFi problem, I can’t use the rig, so that’s my priority for this week.
Let me know if you intend setting another target day for some garden activity across Europe.
but my project does not fall apart. This leaves me time to improve the future installation.
