Hi
After a 2 week holiday on the west coast of France (Vendee, where there are no hills) I managed to get to Gyrn Moelfre GW/NW-049 for a long awaited activation. Just in time - I was starting to suffer summit withdrawal symptoms.
I thought I would try out my newly arrived 6000mAh Turnigy Nano-Tech Lipo battery, which weighs in at 481g - a considerable weight saving on my usual 10Ah slab.
I activated the summit first using 5w on FM attracting 16 chasers. Jill (MW6JBZ/P) then followed up with another 6 to claim her own activation.
I then erected my 40m dipole for a spot of rather QRS CW. I have been practising my CW for ages but the reading bit never seems to get any better hi hi. Thanks to all the chasers who had great patience with me and repeated things several times. Especially my first contact - DL8JJ/P, a S2S with Emit on DM/HE-017. Picking a call from a pile up is not easy when your CW is rubbish!! Despite requesting QRS, I still got a lot of stations sending at a phenomenal rate - unfortunately I was only able to answer the chasers sending at a speed I could read. I suppose if you normally send at 40wpm then 20wpm is quite slow…
I managed to work another 18 stations before the boss said “QRT now”. An hour and a half in the intermittent showers was enough.
Thanks to everybody who called in.
Anyway, when I got home I charged the 3S Lipo to find it took 3988mA of charge. Thinking this was a little high, I checked the FT-857 and found that the 7.0327 CW I had been transmitting on was still set at 100w from my holiday endeavours. This might also go some way to explain the RF dig I got from my key.
I bought my Lipo from the link below for $48.57US & postage.
I have bought many items from them before and they are most reliable with reasonably prompt postage. They have standard postage/weight rates and it is therefore sometimes cheaper to combine postage or buy more than one item.
The batteries are 3S, 11.1 V although this is the quoted discharge voltage. They charge to 4.2v each cell giving 12.6V. They are very heavy duty for their size giving 25C continuous or a 50C burst - not that a SOTA op would ever need it hi hi.
40 QSO’s in total, some low power but FM including longer chats and some multiple repeats of high power CW and still enough left for quite a few more.
The difference in the weight is superb.
Regards
Dave
M0TUB (MW0TUB/P)
Ps Mike (2E0YYY)
Don’t mean to put you out of business - perhaps you can do a deal for bulk!!