Another sunny but very windy day made choose this summit for an activation well sheltered by the hermitage buiding. I sat in the sunshine by the southern stoned wall and it was absolutely comfortable. Nothing to do with what it was out of the sheltered area with that cold Northerly strong wind.
My setup was a 10m long wire hung from my 7m long telescopic fishing rod and sloping down to my unun 9:1, from which a 5m long counterpoise wire was extended on the grass following the same direction of the sloper wire (towards the East).
My activation was 20m CW only and I logged 75 QSOs, 3 of which S2S and 1 DX with the USA in about 2 hours of operation.
This is the full log:
After having been experiencing some sort of intermitent problem with my unun during my last 3 or 4 activations and after having investigated and taken some unsuccessful corrective actions, I finally found the problem last night and I want to show you:
The green cable had been accidentally trapped between the toroid and the soldering ball of the female BNC inner pin, so the green cable PVC cover got punctured creating a short circuit between the BNC inner pin (antenna) and ground.
Problem found and solved now, pfew!
Thank you dear chasers for your calls and QSOs. I’ll be looking forward to copying you all again from a SOTA soon.
Thank you for the QSO Guru. By coincidence I’ve just made a 9:1 Unun and was using it yesterday. Following the discussions on here I made it with enamelled wire but clearly your model with insulated wire works very well too!
Thank you for your call and QSO, John, your signal was fantastic and your morse sounded very well indeed.
Yes, I have a couple of 9:1 unun and both are made with insulated wire. They work fine and lots of QSOs and great DX are in my log to demonstrate it. Probably they are not as efficient as they could be if everything had been made the best way, but I sometimes have the feel that all these losses seen after test bench measurements are not that important in real life when you are the DX and the chasers want a QSO with you
May be one day I’ll make a new one following all the best recommendations and I’ll compare it in the field during a SOTA activation with those I currently have. Very probably we’ll not see any noticieable differences.
Thank you for the S2S dear Jarek and also for the pictures from your side.
I have our QSO recorded and I’ll send it to you by email. I hope you’ll enjoy hearing your signals this side.
I also copied you calling me for S2S during my activation of EA2/NV-119 the previous day. I came back to you with your callsign and signal report, but you never came back to me, so NIL… Sorry. I think I also have it recorded and I’ll send it to you by email for you to hear how well I was copying you.
73,
