California QSO Party
Worked the California QSO Party SSB on Saturday October 7th. In 2+ hours I made 12 contacts on 20 and 15 meters. SSB is truly a challenge when mobile. Need to get my code skills rocking and rolling.
20 meters had significant noise, 15 was good, and 10 meter stations could not hear me with my signals, probably either too weak or flying over the state. 40 meters was dead.
Always good fun.
73 Glenn
… an interesting and unplanned ‘experiment’ happened a couple of days ago…. I have a 130′ 80-10 EFHW up about 40′-50′ stretched between two buildings across the street from each other. Mostly patterned after the MyAntennas.com version but with a few minor some differences.
Well…we had a large CAT 4 hurricane blow through here 2 days ago.. (Lidia) 5- 7″ of rain in a few hours and up to 220KMPH gusting winds according NOAA’s Hurricane Center. Yes it was serious… 4 folks in the region are deceased as a result of this storm.
Half expecting the antenna to come down, I watched as it merrily danced in the howling winds and hissing tropical rain coming in horizontally; the antenna madly dancing back and forth.. but lo… next morning it was still there and working just fine.
Any antenna with wind loading, in particular a spider type wire beam or traditional aluminum beam antenna woulda been turned into pretzels. Antenna survivability is something we as amateurs need to to think about when planning for any operation during an emergency or unexpected weather conditions…
Richard: VA7AA/XE1 Barra de Navidad/Melaque