….Well another walk today, but my brother - the black one feigned a limp so I had to accompany the man up the hill. He had his large backpack today and he took an age at the summit. He took everything out the bag and then began to assemble something like a rubics cube which he attached to the pole thing. I tried barking at it but it didn’t seem to help much. The people my man was talking to complimented me on my barking, apparently the barking modulation was much better than the mans voice. (*) Then this woman came over with a dog she had carried up the hill (imagine the indignity of that) worried that I was cold or hurt. Well of course I wasn’t I was attention seeking and I could see a couple of grouse in the distance…. I was of course silent for the entire time apart from when he plays radio…
(The day before I had a dry run in the garden faffing around for about and hour to get everything connected. Woody was also out in the garden and was silent until I tested the SWR on transmit and called “CQ” at which point he joined in. Why have I got a dog that responds to a CQ call….?)
Well only 4 months into the challenge and I’ve finally got going from Nine Standards Rig G/NP-018. The backpack was the large one as I was carrying the FT-817, Tokyo-Hi Power 30W amp, a 4 element yagi (IZ2UUF design), 4Ah LiFe battery and as insurance the KX2 with a not very 41ft random wire antenna (and counterpoise).
Some observations. When you forget your glasses the display on the Yasau rig is quite small. I need to find a way of keeping the elements of the antenna neatly in place as they move as the antenna is lifted and the second hand amp seems to take about 2 seconds to switch from tx to rx after transmitting….
I think I have become reasonably efficient when doing an activation with my usual KX2 / FT270 combination and it took me much longer to sort out the FT-817 / linear combination along with the antenna. Trying to work out which direction to beam was also a bit fiddly with only two open directions from the summit as the hill isn’t brilliant for VHF as there are bigger hills in most directions surrounding it.
I had a very good report on FM (59+) with Geoff GM4WHA but it was a real struggle on SSB, but I did change the polarisation and I’m guessing that Geoff didn’t.
Conclusions…. I probably ought to sort out the transvertor to work with the KX2. I probably need a couple of elastic bands to hold the elements in properly, and I probably need a hill with better take off…. But at least I have made a start!
Thanks again to all the chasers.
73. Paul
