My June/July trip as SV8/GM0LVI/P was full of surprises. First surprise was the weather as it was extremely wet and stormy for most of the first ten days. Locals said they had never seen weather like it at that time of year – it was like a bad winter!
Next surprise was how well my little Buddistick performed. I set it up on the balcony (about 20m from the sea) with three radials in a dog-leg configuration on the floor. I had to put a plastic bag over the loading coil on some days due to the heavy rain, but managed just short of 250 QSOs which was quite good considering that I was not QRV very often and only for an hour or so at a time.
My biggest surprise was one day when the SFI had risen into the low 70s and 17 metres was open. I’d been working at lot of stations in EU when I was called by JA1FTL, I worked him and then called CQ JA and in the space of less than an hour worked 5 more JAs.
Conditions on the whole were not good, propagation above 20m didn’t happen often and on many days there was a very high noise level on 20m which led to me switching off the pre-amp on the KX3 and switching in noise reduction. One thing that did strike me was that in general I was receiving better signal reports than I was giving – possibly due to the tiny antenna. I ran 10 Watts most of the time, but dropped to 5 Watts on several occasions when I was called by /QRP stations.
I was really glad of my little memory keyer as calling CQ while running low power tends to take a lot of time to produce results. It also lets me drink coffee at the same time!
