Had a good couple of hours today on good ole Billinge Hill G/SP-017. Tried out a vertical dipole on 10m. It worked pretty well with the band open to east coast USA. 14 in the log on 10m ssb with 7 of them being stateside , FIVE within 30 miles or so of the summit and an unexpected S2S with G4OOE/P and one from continetal EU (F4WBN).
Minnesota was the best DX. I did try 10m FM but with no ability to self spot the calls went unheeded.
80w ssb from yaesu FT-891. 50w fm from FT-8900 for both 10m fm and 2m fm).
It was getting cold so finished up with 12 on 2m Fm including a very welcome old voice.
I suspect that it’s this connection that in general limits Buddipole’s power rating to < 250w.
It’s pretty simple to rig up a feed line connector that bypasses the VersaTee and interfaces directly to the two driven elements. It’s on my list and then maybe I could take the 2 element somewhere fun with the JUMA 1000 for the 10m ARRL contest in December like Madeira or Gran Canary. SOTA and a contest in one trip!!
Hi Andrew,
Tom is referring here to the new regulations that are to come in, in the UK from February 2024 onwards and one of those is that the UK operator can put whatever he or she likes after a slash after his callsign. So while that is not possible in Australia or Germany, it will be possible in the UK.
One example could be /LH for operation at a lighthouse. This messes up DXSummit.fi which then reports the station as being in Norway - I can see similar problems arising but the DXSummit site has several problems already e.g. its exclude-digital-modes from display filter doesn’t work for example.
Correct Ed, but I think Andrew is meaning that “No they won’t be allowed to do such a thing - if they try, it will be noticed, and we will disallow such conduct as ‘not in the spirit of the Programme’”.
I suggest the organisers add that “suffixes are not to be used except where required in law in the country of operation” (or something to that effect) to the challenge rules for clarification and to avoid arguments later.
73 Ed.
It’ll happen for 30 seconds and the novelty will wear off. Or it’ll be beaten out of newbies by the greybeard band police. Either way, it’s an issue that’s not an issue.
Thanks Ron and for once southern California is a good place to be as making contacts isn’t quite the same as the US East Coast or from the EU. We are so far south (almost same latitude as Spain) that 10m can be kind and we have a lot of ops one skip away within the US that are keen to make 10m contacts.
To Andy (@MM0FMF ) and Ed’s (@DD5LP ) discussion its not a contest but if it were I suspect @K6EL or @N6AN will go the distance and get the W6 high score
Well, I had a blast from Corndon Hill GW/MW-013 today. I wasn’t sure that I would get 4 contacts on 28MHz to qualify the activation, but ended up with 10 on SSB and 7 on CW.
I certainly wasn’t expecting the DX, one (or more) of those “WhooHoo” moments when numb fingers are forgotten!
It was also a pleasant surprise to work G / GW / GI stations by whatever propagation mode, though they weren’t as strong as VK, obviously
The station: FT817 plus CB amp (modified to include a low pass filter and BNC connectors :o) running about 30W output.
Many thanks to all who called in, especially those contacts which took several repeats for me to copy! Also, apologies to anyone who called me without success.
I got the impression that my receiver was a little bit deaf - I’ll set it up on the bench later and investigate with a signal generator.
The little amplifier does introduce a small loss on receive because of the diode switching arrangement, but I did try switching it out of circuit to no avail.
Well done Adrian (@G4AZS) and that pretty much sums up why the 10m challenge is worth the effort. I worked a guy in Columbia on 10m phone on Saturday and while I guess in the grand scheme of things “no big deal” it seemed a big deal to me on Saturday!
Yesterday I activated W3/PW-050 in the snowy Pennsylvania mountains. I have been starting on 10m my last couple dozen activations and although the band seems dead after spotting myself and calling CQ I can drum up activity more often than not.
On 1-Jan-24 I got just one 10m QSO (Canary Islands). Today I was QRV for only ~20 minutes and got ten 10m QSOs, 3 EU, 7 USA of which 3 are west coast (early risers!).
Same setup on both activations on similar 1-pointer summits near home: KX2, 10W CW to (12.5m long) LNR Precision 40/20/10 EFHW Inverted L on 5m pole. I doubt this improved result was because 10m band condx were better today but rather that I was QRV ~2 hours later (1430 to 1450 utc). I’ll try to make all future 10m activations about this time of day.
Current prop stats above. Not as good as October when the A was very low and the Pacific was workable on 10 and 12m on several days. Might get back to that in March. Condx pretty good for back scatter today though in northern EU, but I couldn’t hear you unfortunately. It could be down to power if you were < 10 watts or less. Nothing wrong with that, I don’t like carrying things like an FT-857 and accompanying battery up a hill myself these days, whereas 10 years ago it was the thing to do.
Great to see so much interest in the 10m Challenge, its really taken off. When the time and weather is right I will be toggling down to G/TW-004 myself for a session.
crazy condx today… strong QSB … the distances changed quickly… from within Germany to Brazil… I didn’t hear anything from North America… HB9 is groundwave
