I had my first go on 10m this afternoon. It was supposed to be a rest day after a long day yesterday seeing Monster Trucks in Leeds; a Christmas present from my wife. I decided that I could probably squeeze in an activation of White Hill G/SP-006 as it’s only about 15 minutes drive from my house. I’ve recently built a 10m RockMite and low pass filter but I’d not tried it on air.
I started first on 15m with my 9v PP3 powered home brew RockMite. It was a struggle but I eventually got 5 QSOs after about an hour of trying. Having got the 9V battery qualification out of the way, it was then time to try the 10m RockMite][.
I initially hooked up the RockMite][ 10m with my little home brew amp. The gain really falls off up at 28MHz so for 350mW in, I get around 1.7 watts out. I am intending to swap to an IRF510 and different biasing along with higher supply voltage for a future scheme. Within not much time at all, I had 7 QSOs in the log, including PY2VM! During the Transatlantic S2S party I’d used my amp throughout and was disappointed that I’d not tried a barefoot QSO, so I disconnected the amp and called CQ. I managed another 4 transatlantic QSOs, including one with @ND0C, at just under 4000 miles, thats about 11,000 miles per watt!
My combined 10m QSO map -
Really enjoyable activation.
73, Colin
