Today I successfully activated two hills in Orlické hory mountain range – OK/KR-008 Velká Deštná and OK/KR-069 Šerlich.
I went to the “expedition” together with my Dad (he, as always, was helping me carrying equipment and setting up my station) and my Mum (she joint us because trip to Velká Deštná is very nice and was taking care of us :-)) and last but not least our expedition mascot, Dandy:-)
At 12:00 CET we parked our car in a col/saddle between Šerlich and Malá Deštná hills and set out for a short trip to OK/KR-008 Velká Deštná, 1115 m ASL. We got there about 40 minutes later and started setting up the station. We erected cca. 7 meters high mast with vertical aerial for 145 MHz. My RIG was an old 5W FM hand-held CT-22 Midland powered by 12V/7Ah SLAB. At 12:55 everything was set up and I started calling CQ on 145.450 MHz.
The first station called me after about five minutes of CQing – it was Erwin OE5PEN/P from SOTA OE/OO-061 Pfannstein! His power was also just 5 Watts, distance between us 320 km… not bad QSO on 145 MHz FM! :-)
During next 20 minutes I managed to make three more QSOs, so the activation of Velká Deštná was successful and we started returning back to the saddle. But it still wasn’t the end of our expedition since we went to one more hill – OK/KR-069 Šerlich, 1027 m ASL.
Setting up a station was a little easier there, we used a triangulation shaft on the top to hold the mast – however, since the shaft was a little slanted, my aerial really wasn’t in ideal position. I’m even a little ashamed for the following photo:-) Making 4 necessary QSOs took me a little longer, but finally I succeeded.
Finally I’d like to thank a lot to all stations that called me – to OK1DVP, OK1UTX, OK2UMM/P, OK1VEL, OK1VRW, OK2JSX, OK1VOC and especially to OE5PEN/P for my first SOTA QSO and for my first Summit-to-Summit QSO.
CQ WW CW DX Contest 2009
Last weekend I participated in CW part of CQ WW DX Contest. Since I haven’t used Morse code in last 2 years – and frankly have never been good at it – I didn’t try to reach some high score and just enjoyed the contest.
I turned on my FT-897D on Saturday at 7 AM. I started on 20 m band, found the first strong station and tried to read its callsign. Unfortunately it was 5B/G4IRN – great callsign to hear after 2 years of not using Morse code! :-)
However, after some time I read the callsign and answered the CQ… and 1st station was in my log! And soon a few others were following… I was amazed how well other stations were reading my signals – most of them recognized correctly my call on 1st attempt, which doesn’t happen so often to me in phone contests.
And what was my surprise after about 35 QSOs, when I found out that I was transmitting with just 20 Watts! (I’d been doing some experiments with digimodes the day before and had forgotten to set power back to 100 W)
During the whole contest I made 146 contacts with 33 DXCC countries and 13 CQ zones, most of them on 20 meters band. I was a little disappointed that I made only 11 QSOs on 15 meters – there was quite a strong QRM, sometimes even S7-S8. On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised by 40 meters band – for 1st time I managed to make contact with U.S. station.
To sum up, I must say I really liked the CW contest and decided to work on my “Morse code reading skills” to be better next time.
Here you can see a table of contacted DXCC entities:
And here is table of contacted CQ zones: