- Sunday 4 April (Easter Day)
- Quick trip out in the evening with loop receive antenna. Heard HB9ASB
at 439. Distance is over 1,000km.
- Tuesday 6 April
- Sked with Peter, G3LDO, on 73kHz at 1600UTC.
- Started to set up on the beach at Freshwater East at 1345. This involved
carrying several hundred kilos of gear 200 metres across a soft sandy beach:
a generator, two 9m telescopic poles, hundreds of metres of wire, several
loading coils, transmitter, receiver, car battery and charger, and various
tools. This left us (myself and my youngest son David, 2E1DAV) exhausted
to start with. The photo shows Dave with all the gear.
- We had decided to connect the two poles together to make 12m, and had
identified a high point on a nearly cliff to anchor the far end at about
25m. David started to climb the cliff, then came down as he did not think
amateur radio was worth dying for. We tried Plan B - a rope over a tree
on the side of the cliff - but this didn't work either. Plan C involved
running up a long footpath to get part way up the cliff and throw down
a rope from there. This worked but gave us only about 15m of height. The
bad news was that all this had taken over an hour and the sked time had
arrived with no mast and no gear operational. Being a very remote part
of the UK, mobile phones do not work there so we had to hope that Peter
would wait on frequency for us.
- By 1800 we had a mast up and some 70m of wire between it and the cliff
support.
 Also a 200m earth wire going to a stake in the sea. By this time a
local fisherman had latched onto us and stood silently beside us, watching
everything we did.
- The battery was connected and the receiver burst into life. The coil
taps were selected for best receive signal on HBG (75.0kHz) - S9+20dB.
- 1815 - 75 minutes late - we were ready to transmit. The generator worked
fine (Jewsons supply a 2.5kW genny which is very reliable with no trace
of QRM on LF). The VFO was tuned onto frequency. But when the BK Electronics
300W amplifier was plugged in, the current meter hit the end stop and it
blew a fuse! I quickly found I had connected the output the wrong way round
but no harm had been done and I improvised a new fuse from strands of flexible
wire.
- 1830. We were still being watched closely by the silent fisherman,
who even knelt beside me whilst I was repairing the amp. I finally got
everything working and pressed the key. Very little PA transistor current
and the antenna current meter hardly moved. The Tx was OK as current could
be produced on 136kHz. No amount of adding coils and altering taps over
about half an hour - so boring that our watcher finally went away - could
produce a good match so, as it was starting to rain we finally gave up.
After carrying everything back to the car we were totally exhausted and
despondant.
- What does not come out of the above is how uncomfortable it is to have
sand blowing everywhere. It gets into everything, equipment and clothing,
and turns all poles, wire etc into sandpaper making your hands sore with
everything you do. It was also damp with a cold wind. I do not recommend
using a beach for amateur radio, and it is always preferable to be able
to operate from inside a car, so that even if you do get cold and wet putting
up the antenna, you can get warm afterwards.
- Saturday 10 April
- The generator had to go back at midday so one last go at 73kHz, and
there may be time for 136kHz as well. Weather forecast has been rain and
wind but we were going to do it anyway. As it happened it was warm and
sunny, though windy.
- Used a car park close to the beach which had been used successfully
last New Year's Day (Locator IO71NP). This is a big area next to a river
and only a few hundred metres from the sea. This time of year it is very
quiet.
- Put a halyard 10m up a tree and erected a 13m mast 75m away. The mast
bent in the wind but stayed up. A 100m radial was run out next to the river.
- Disaster struck again when the VFO would not work. Found a loose wire
and lashed up a repair but it would not tune below 74kHz (at this frequency
the tuning capacitor has a small range so most has to be done with fixed
capacitors). Abandoned 73kHz and decided to spend the final 45 minutes
on 136.
- All worked fine on this band (at last) and several stations could be
heard amongst the Loran QRM, including DJ8CY/P at 439.
- Worked G4GVC (gave 589, got 579 - two s-points up on my previous activity
from this site); G3XTZ (599/579) and G3KEV (579/329) who, at 420km is my
best DX whilst portable.
- Summary
- As usual, the week's field portable activity proved to be harder work
than expected and was a mixture of successes and failures. Both, of course,
can be used to learn lessons for the future and this has resulted in better
results every visit. The main lesson was that I must do some dummy runs
at home to make sure that as little as possible is left to chance on 73kHz
- which once again proved to be much more difficult than 136.
- My thanks to Peter, G3LDO, for his efforts in monitoring for my non-existent
signals.
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