I have a drive on site North of town which is great for setting up mast systems and testing/building antennas but I have been looking for somewhere a bit closer to home and also a bit quieter on HF. Also in times of prolonged wet weather (like now!) access my usual site can be prone to getting stuck in the mud in my 2WD car. As there looked to be good activity today on 20m and 40m I decided to pop out for an hour or so to test a new site under 15 minutes drive from me that I have been considering. It’s relatively high for the area, a pretty clear take off and I was able to find a spot to pull off the road that was fairly clear of houses and power wires to erect the inverted V link dipole I take for SOTA activations:
The site gets cell coverage so I had the luxury of using my Surface Pro 3 for logging with Log4OM and online lookups on qrz.com via my phone as a WiFi hotspot:
For power I used one of my 8400mAh LiFePo4 batteries I also use for SOTA activations as I don’t have my car wired up to power the radio.
I was pleased to get no noise at all on 40m and 20m so that is a bonus. Bands were fairly busy with some strong special event stations and many calling them. I tuned around getting in where I could. I could hear several USA stations calling in strongly and managed to find a few calling to work. The battery wasn’t newly charged so I only worked for about an hour an half but it was nice to get out and try the site out. Looks promising and should be ideal for final assembly and tuning of my forthcoming cobweb antenna build.
Only 13 QSOs but happy with a quick spell on the radio:
