| Operation Details |
| Park: https://pota.app/#/park/GB-1306 Grid square: IO93is WAB square: SE63 |
| Working Conditions |
| Icom IC-705 Icom AH-705 Sotabeams tactical mini Sotabeams EFLW Ham2K Polo |
| Operations Totals |
| 41 QSO’s 16 DXCC entities 3 bands and 1 mode 40m – 12 SSB 20m – 28 SSB 10m – 1 SSB |
Was planning for an early start but slept in for a change, got all the gear packed up, made a flask of coffee and some breakfast to take with me and set off on the short walk to the Willows, got about 1 minute down the road and realised I had forgotten to pick up the external battery, about turn and hoofed it back to home to grab it.
2nd attempt set off walking and it was a nice morning, a little cool but dry.
I brought a walking pole which normally would be laughable for the length and type of this walk but I wanted to try out an idea for raising the Icom AH-705 ATU off the ground. Plan was to peg out the walking pole like the mast and attach the ATU to the top with a Velcro cable tie.
As it is a work in progress I decided to use just one piece of cord. Figure of 8 note in one end to loop over the first tent peg, then run the cord up and round the pole, down to the 2nd peg, then back up round the pole and down to the 3rd and tie it off there. It fell over the first time as I had not set the pegs outs equally enough. 2nd time worked. Must have been a day for 2nd times.
Once I got all the kit set up I put my poncho down as a ground mate, poured a cup of coffee and set out finding a frequency. I started on 40m and was working well then someone came on about 2Khz down and was splattering over me. Time to move on.
Went to 20m and had got some great contacts and some well known hunters.
It started to drizzle so put the poncho on and had the radio on my knee, it worked ok when I was on a specific frequency calling CQ but trying to tune around had keep ducking my head inside to see what frequency I was on.
Best contact of the day was hunting a Greek SOTA station, we both had to work hard to get the contact but we managed it!
| Map Band Key | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 80m | 40m | 20m | 15m | 10m | 2m | ||||||
| 60m | 30m | 17m | 12m | 6m | 70cm | ||||||