Bonjour Gerald,
I’m really sorry that you had such a boring time. I oriented my yagi in your direction several times and I even called specifically to you sometimes in French, but nothing was heard from you in return.
Many of the operators I heard showed little experience in handling a pileup, thus making far too long QSOs. There were also various frequencies occupied with non SOTA related QSOs, some eco-links and other activities like DVGE award, making it difficult for the SOTA activators and their potential chasers and S2S.
HF activators are usually far more efficient, but many of the newbies we had on 2m that day will surely learn and things should go faster and more efficiently in the future.
I’ll be looking forward to making more HF QSOs with you.
73,
I activated EA2/NV-092 this afternoon in order to check several things on 2m FM after the many problems I had on the August 1st VHF FM long distance event.
This was my set-up today, which is the same I had initially planned for August 1st event, but had to modify because of the problems I had.
This refurbished 3-ways coax switch was repaired, as I informed in a previous post above and has been tested successfully today with the vertical antenna and the 2 wire radials.
This was also repaired at the summit during August 1st event activation and later in a more robust way a home a few days ago, although I’ve not tested it today.
This PL-259 was repaired and properly soldered at home this week and has been successfully tested today.
This problem happened again today with both antennas and after some time checking connectors here and there, I finally found that it was the Daiwa LA-2035 amplifier who seemed to have some problem and caused the SWR to going mad hight sometimes, not always. As soon as I removed the amplifier and connected the antennas directly to my FT-817ND, everything was perfect in terms of SWR with both antennas. I had been using that Daiwa amplifier for years in my shack with my FT-470 HH, but I didn’t have an SWR meter and I never realised that the ampli, which I bought sencond hand, seems to have a problem.
My afternoon activation was not the best timing for 2m FM and I only logged 3 QSOs in over an hour CQing with 5W. After this, I fancied to have some fun and I installed my endfed wire sloper for a bit on HF CW. I logged 8 QSOs on 20m and just 1 on 30m. Declan @EI6FR, who chased me on 20m, also called me on 30m at 18h24 z, but didn’t seem to copy me or the QSB made my signals vanish, because I several times got back to him with his callsign and signal report, but he never showed up again. So NIL…
This is the map of the QSOs:
