Just a reminder to everybody that UHF Fun day has been planned by 2E0FSR on Sunday the 27th of March at 1200GMT! After the success of VHF Fun day on the 02/01/2011 it will be nice to hear some people on 432/433 and 1296/1297 MHz on this day!
The clocks will have gone forward by this date, so be aware!
Make sure you alert yourself so that we do not encroach on other people’s choice of Hill!
Finally would anybody be up for low band VHF Fun day sometime in the summer months? Lets get 50MHz and 70MHz busy for a change!
I see you have alerted for the Fun Day! Hopefully we will manage a S2S! I am taking G4VCH with me! He has never done a SOTA activation so at 70 years young I bet he can wait! Having said that he did the whole SOTA concept 40 years ago, however it use to be called Hilltopping and WAB!!
We will have to pick a day in May or June when the Sporadic E should be kicking about!
In reply to 2E0XTL:
The VHF fun day was good fun!! So I hope the UHF one will be the same, im driving down south so I hope to hear a lot of stations on the other side if the border.
What equipment are people taking?
Here it will be the ft817 4 meters of fishing pole and 7 element yagi, also a couple of lipo batteries.
Unfortunately I’m going to have to sit this one out - family commitments dictate. However, I am working on plans to get up that clay heap G/DC-004 with my 817 + 50W BNOS linear + 11 element 70cms yagi - that will guarantee the weather being sunny down in Cornwall so that I will be required to chauffeur the family down to the beach.
Providing the weather is OK I hope to be out. Don’t know yet whether I’ll be in south west Scotland (in which case I will be up one of the usual hills with a decent take-off to the south like Cairnharrow) or in Edinburgh, in which case I’ll try to get down to somewhere that will give me more of a chance to make contacts to the south, like Broad Law.
I’ll alert once I know.
I will take the bare FT-817 with probably the 6-ele SOTAbeam for 70cm (haven’t built a mini linear for 70cm yet!), and my new(er) transverter for 23cm that runs about 3 to 5W into a 15-ele DL7WU Yagi. Happy to do SSB or FM.
Hope to get more 23cm contacts to the south anyway over the summer months.
Personally I don’t see the point of a UHF fun day. Every day is a UHF fun day here. If you lot don’t choose to call on anything other than two metres FM…
In fact I am totally teed off with all these fun days. Has some bugger handed out my shift rota? I always seem to be working. I am this time too. Funny I have the same problem with the radio rallies as well.
Just kidding folk! Great idea. I love working the higher bands for their rarity factor. If people are listening it is amazing how far you can work even on 23cms. I think my best was working 23cms over 100 miles rubber duck to rubber duck, both on 500mW.
Don’t complain you got NW-050 today, I was ear-wigging having fixed the feeder to an HF antenna that had gone o/c. There was a procession of people announcing they had chased all of NW with that one!
Mail me your rota to the end of March and I’ll see if I can find some overlap so I can give one of the rare-ish NS summits I have planned for this month. Then you wont mind missing UHF funday so much.
Andy today was a truly great radio day. Not only did I get NW-050 leaving me just NW-060, which is a real easy one and so should go soon, even if I have to send Helen up there, but just worked most of EU on 2m SSB in the contest and bagged 76 chaser points too. Imagine what I could do if I got my antennas off the ground so I wasn’t beaming through next door or lived a few hundred feet above sea level. ;0) Still three SW and three MW to go as well as NW-060 for Wales and SE-007 for England.
Hopefully we will have some more of these Activity days on the rare bands! I managed to drum up some more interest for the UHF fun day, whilst out on GW/SW-009! Having said that I was using 4m at the time!
We will have to see how this UHF day goes before any potential plans are laid down for a Low Band VHF Fun Day! It would be ace to hear a hive of activity on both 4m and 6m! We all have 6m gear on our 817s and triband handhelds! Why are we not using the band more on FM!! Hopefully the activity days will inspire some more people on to the rare bands! I would think NW-060 would be an obvious choice!!! I know a chaser that wants that one!!
I’ve had a great weekends radio. I activated G/NP-008 Great Whernside on Saturday. And on Sunday G/NP-010 Pen-y-ghent then G/NP-017 Fountains Fell.
From home I managed to work plenty of DL, PA and the Czech Republic for a new one on 2M, twice!
DR1H was 59+20dB on my Icom 7400. The same signal a local station 4km down the road from me gives me on 2M FM!!!
I’m looking forward to the UHF Fun Day. As for 50MHz, I don’t have an antenna yet though I have a dipole centre and some wire so not a problem. We need to set a date for the 6M Fun Day.
