My SV8/GM0LVI/P operation went better than usual. In June I’d been restricted to a Buddistick antenna and though it worked pretty well for a small multi-band antenna, on this last trip I had space overhead on our balcony to put up a full size GP for 14 MHz upwards.
I bought a 10m pole but didn’t require all the sections (or weight) so reduced it in size and made a carry tube that also functioned as a slightly elevated base. I took radiating wires for 20m, 17m and 15m and these ran up the pole internally – but only one band at a time so changing bands involved telescoping the pole and running a new radiator as well as retuning the two radials – a FG-01 analyser proved very useful when retuning.
My September QTH was on the second floor of a small block of studios about 30m from the Ionian sea with great take-off to the east, north and south but to the west there was a fairly high range of mountains.
I started operating on 20m with reasonably good results and half way through my second day changed to 17m and found my QSO rate rose. On the 9th September I moved onto 15m which was very lively and much to my very great surprise received a 579 from YV8AD and 559 from N8DX so my signal was making it over the mountains to my west. Unfortunately the great conditions on 15m didn’t last as a major CME played havoc with propagation and 15m became next to useless the following day. So from then on I stuck to 17m, but this did bring me JO1WX0 on the 12th with a 559.
I closed operations on the 16th September with 246 QSOs in the log but as far as I know didn’t work any QRPC members though did make contacts with several QRP stations in Europe.
