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.
