EI0EL

Another lovey day here at one of the sport we like to operate portable from. Great success again on Franks 80m linked dipole with the IRTS News coming in strong. Frank was able to hear a large number of signal reporting coming in after the news. Dom successfully make contact with the IRTS 2m news from his HT and received a good signal report from the news reader. Tom and John set up a "portable" 20m two element Yagi and had great success making contact with K3LR in to Mercer County, Pennsylvania, a distance of over 5,500km, and received a signal report of 59. Contact was also make with KV2K in Johnsonburg, New Jersey again a signal report of 59 was received. Contact was also made with stations in Slovenia and Hungry.

Another successful and fun day operating portable. Contacts were made with stations in Ireland, England and Germany. Frank  got to test his homebrew linked dipole on 80m and made a number of contacts within Ireland after the IRTS News. Tom added 40m to his linked dipole and after some fine tuning got some acceptable initial results. After some further fine tuning a SWR of 1:1.12 was achieved cantered on 7.150. Very happy with that.

Shortly after 1200 on Saturday members of the club met to get their antenna's setup for the 8 hours Portable Operations Challenge contest run by the team over at Fox Mike Hotel .  The team setup a home brew linked dipole (20m and 40m) using 3x 6 meter telescopic masts for TX. One supporting the dipole centre and the other two supporting the ends of the legs. This allowed us to get the legs as horizontal to the ground as possible.  Taking turns operating, logging and coffee making was key to keeping us semi-sane for the duration. Luckily the rain held off but there was a chill in the wind. We started off operating from a table in the open but soon took refuge in the comfort of the back of a van.  This acted as a rather large wind breaker. We had two people inside the van at a time , one as logger and the other as operator. This enabled us to follow the current DoH guidelines regarding social distancing. The radio was powered off a combination of a lead acid battery and home brew lif