Well things started off great. Left home at 1pm and headed over to Dale Park (at the dead end of Dale Ave) in Ottawa and was on site by about 1330 and had everything set up and was ready to go for the start of the Contest at 1400 local.
Just to refresh your memory I was operating with my FT 817 using a 3 element beam on a camera tripod for 2m and my recently homebrewed 6m Delta Loop (with a bamboo boom) on a 17 foot pushup mast using a friction lock for the sections… The 3 element was about 10 feet off the ground as I had put the camera tripod on top of the picnic table for a few extra feet of altitude. I knew where I should of heard the 2m signals from but no luck at all on 2m.
I made my first contact with Greg VA3GD who lives just west of the park… not DX and he hear my 5w signal just fine with no problems so I knew that everything was working… I then heard some stations in the distance so I tried to turn the pole to move the delta loop so it was aiming south east from its current west direction and then it happened…
The Domino effect so to speak…
The top section dropped…. the next section dropped…. the next section dropped…. which caused the last section to drop and when it could drop no more it stopped… The sudden stopping caused the bamboo boom to snap on either side of the plastic “T” that was holding the boom onto the vertical push up masting…
This in effect ended the day for me on 6m. I tried removing the wire from the boom and hanging it in the tree but the tree was not cooperating… I did have my Parr end fed antenna in the go bag so i tried that but although it would load up on 6m with the help of my QRP Auto tuner I heard no one else…
When life give you lemons you make lemonade so I was not going to waste this beautiful afternoon in the park…. The 817 was working fine with the Par on the HF bands (where it was designed to work) and so I managed a very nice contact with EA8AM in the Canary Islands on 14.302 ssb.
Above picture taken from his QRZ Page… He gave me a 5/7 report on 20m… I think the beam was out performing my Par… But the Par did get a 5w signal out to where he could hear me..
I also listened around for some SOTA activity as some local operators were going to up to a location but I did not hear those new KX3s on SSB and the one SOTA station I heard on 40m cw was going way to fast for me to copy… OHWELL…. It was a beautiful day and the wx was cooperating… I did find a new and easy to get to location to operate from and it has shade and a picnic table (even a timmies a 5 min walk away) so its almost perfect…
In my earlier post I was joking about having to re engineer the boom on the delta loop to make it easier to pack…. now I have to re do the delta loop because the boom ended up in pieces due to an unplanned structural failure (it broke)…
In the greater picture if thats the worst that happened to me yesterday…. no big deal… The plans for today (Sunday) is build a simple dipole and go back and try and give some contacts out on 6m for the remainder of the contest… Right now as I type this I am listening on 6 and have been for the last 45 minutes or so…. not hearing anything that would make me want to rush out to the field right away anyway…. actually not hearing anything except static… so maybe…
The temps are supposed to rise back up today… Estimates of 40 deg C with the humidex so perhaps instead I’ll just stay in the nice and cool shack and make some contacts instead…
73bob
Tags: amateur radio, Broken Antenna, CQ WW VHF Contest, Fallen and it can't get up, VA3GD
