Today was the second day of teh Annual VKFF Activation Weekend.
Unfortunately I had more than a few things to do today (including two trios to Jaycar to pick up some bits for my new nanoVNA; one to get some cables and BNC adapters, and the second to pick up the second BNC adapter that I’d left behind and a couple of others to get me to PL259).
Anyway, as such I ended up leaving just around 2:30pm and as a result arriving at this park and starting operation just after 4pm.
I chose this park as it now brings the eligible activations with regards to the Boomerang Award up to the required five. Now I just need to do this with two other parks to qualify (this park takes me to three qualified).
APRS
So you can see, it’s a bit of a drive. About 50 minutes. You can actually see my stop at Jaycar on Tuggerah Straight, as I had to track back 12 hours to get this map.
The route there is the eastern one. For some reason the GPS thinks the western one is the quickest way home.
You can see me walking around the car park while activating.
Google Earth
The dot is pretty close to where I set up. I set up in the same place that I have done previously in this park. The difference being that there was someone parked where I normally park so the car was not beside where I set up. Fortunately it didn’t rain so I had no mad dashes to get stuff covered up.
Quite definitely within the park boundaries.
Putting things in to some geographic context. This is pretty close to the southern most tip of the Central Coast/
Setting Up
I didn’t have the larger table with me today so I used my camp table, which is more than sufficient. It just meant I needed to use this little stool instead of the comfy chair.
Oh you may (or may not) notice that these photos are not quite the quality that I normally post. While I brought the good camera with me, I left it’s memory card in the computer here at home and the “spare” was stuffed.
I used the Lenovo tablet that I use for logging to take some photos.
So I remembered to put the flag up, though there was very little wind today.
Instead of putting up a 7m pole to attach each end of the 80m segments, I again left the 80m segments off, electing to throw the ends over some branches. I found some excellent ones, getting me probably 4-5m up at the ends. This was the southern end.
Looking back from the southern end.
Looking at the northern end. You can see the rope angled down to the right and tied off on the fence.
Looking back from the northern end.
The Activation
I figured I would be happy to get the ten contacts required to make this my fifth VKFF activation of this park, given how late I was starting.
I kicked off on 40m at 04:19pm (05:19UTC) as it seemed pretty active there.
Wow!
By 4:39pm (05:39UTC) I had 19 SSB contacts on 40m!
Up to 20m.
Five SSB contacts between 4:46pm (05:46UTC) and 5:56pm. I continued to call for a bit and got no response. Strange, as I could hear Paul VK2PAS was pulling folks in hand over fist, and I was hearing them all.
OK, I dropped down the band to try CW. I then noticed that I was getting a High SWR warning on the FT-818.
It turns out that I had one leg of the dipole set up for 17m. No wonder things didn’t look good.
Picked up seven CW contacts on 20m between 5:08pm (06:08UTC) and 6:15 before going back for some more SSB on 20, picking up another seven by 5:30pm (06:30UTC).
The higher bands had treated me well yesterday so I headed up to 10m.
Between 5:37pm (06:37UTC)and 5:51pm I added ten more SSB contacts there.
Headed to 30m and between 5:58pm (06:58UTC) and 6:01pm added six more SSB contacts.
Back to 40m at 6:11pm (07:11UTC) to add another thirteen to finish the day off at 6:41pm (07:41UTC).
Packed up and left by about 7:05pm and was horrified to see that I had left myself less time than I thought to get home, set mu guitar and effects up and start performing online at 8pm. I got home with 9 minute remaining to do this (and surprisingly started pretty much on time!).
I was a little disappointed tat I didn’t give myself time to try 15m.
The Statistics
Modes CW: 7 SSB: 60 Parks VKFF-0444: 1 VKFF-0092: 1 VKFF-2389: 1 VKFF-0344: 1 VKFF-2326: 1 5 park contacts - 5 unique Bands 40M: 32 20M: 19 30M: 6 10M: 10 67 unique contacts (0 duplicates) 67 log entries
If I was happy with getting 84 contacts yesterday over the time that I spent there, I was amazed at getting 67 in 2 hours and twenty odd minutes!
