Ramblings of a sad old Radio Ham and buggar all to do with Tony Hancock
Ive never ventured onto 2m on anything other than FM so I think after being licensed for 30 years its time I make the effort to try something else, just built this nice compact 6 element LFA for 2m, not got it up yet but just tested it on a small pole in the back garden, looking forward to getting it up on the back of the house and giving some 2m CW and SSB a try, next on the list is a small 10 Element for 70cm.
Well not much to report, I took down the rotary dipole and replaced it with my old Cushcraft R7000 as it gives me access to more bands, again its not ideal but i have to be wary of the neighbours and as considerate as possible, not sure what plans I have but one of them is to build a Cobweb antenna and see how that performs, the Cushcraft vertical is designed to be mounted at an optimum height of 18ft so as you can see being ground mounted isnt ideal but it gets me up and running on 7 bands, being vertical its prone to much more noise than the horizontal antenna but again not much I can do, 30m the noise level is over S9 which is a pain, 20m noise level is about an S5 which is workable and about the same on 40m less so on the higher bands which are pretty much dead at the moment,
When you have been off the air for quite a while and your desperate after moving to a new house to get something up and running, this is me.
The driven element from my TB3 3 element tribander, an antenna in this location I will never get to erect so am temporarily using the driven element in the back garden at 10ft, crude and very temporary but at least I can have a listen around and it actually works ok.
Desperate times mean desperate measures.
Well just having a play with some sort of Amateur Radio blog, first post just testing the wordpress install, head over to QRZ to find out a bit more about me, been licensed for 30 years now, callsigns are G0KOM, ZC4MK, VP8COI and spent 6 years living in Spain and operating as EA5/G0KOM
The Image for this post is my operating position at VP8COI, a freezing cold portacabin in the middle of Mount Pleasant airfield.