Usually this weekend I visit Belgium’s biggest hamfest. But my hambuddy ON4BHQ wasn’t available this year and I decided not to go there. I don’t need anything and I’m tired of seeing all that same crap in the flea market for over a decade. Sometimes I think these guy’s hobby is to haul their antiques from fair to fair year after year.
This weekend I decided to do something good for the hobby instead. After all, what is our hobby if we don’t get on the air and make contacts on HF? So my plan was to be active and hand out the elusive ON multiplier to my Scandinavian friends in the SAC CW contest.
For that I cranked up the tower one level on Saturday. I wanted to hang up my 80m dipole but I couldn’t locate it. I moved some shelves and boxes in the garage half a year ago and I still need to figure out what is where. Since the 160m wire is still disconnected I hung up the 80m wire as an inverted L. The antenna analyzer gave me thumbs up so I was ready to go. This antenna works great like this too. Thanks to the elevated radials.
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I got up early to work the SACers on 80. That was a noisy band. What’s new? Thunderstorms over the UK in a 500-700km range and also fierce lightning strikes between Italy and Corsica. So the static was raining on the 3.5 MHz parade. More luck on 40: less noise and louder signals. And more signals.
After sunrise signals were weak on 20. Too early or really crappy conditions? So took a long break for breakfast. After that and with the sun up the skip was great between me and up north, with the antenna not too high. I ended up with 250 QSO. I honored the dozen QSY requests for 15m and 10m. There wasn’t much life on 28 MHz but every request to move resulted in a QSO. I guess many needed ON.
I was glad to have been on the air in my favorite mode.