Not so organised this year with the antennas, I still had the 40m 2 element reversible beam up at 70 ft, for NW/SE directions and the 80m inverted vee dipole above that at 90 ft, but leading into the week before BERU nothing at all for HF.
But I thought I had enough time to rebuild the Spiderbeam and get that up on the second tower at 70ft. I had previously re modelled and optimised this antenna using EZNEC so I was keen to get the antenna built and tested.
This required some early mornings before work commitments but as the week progressed it was looking like I might not make it, so for a couple of evenings I setup some spotlights on our property, these were very popular with all the local bugs that seem to come from far and wide to take part in the antenna building project.
Anyway by late Friday afternoon I had the Spiderbeam up again along with a 40m dipole at 70ft facing NE/SW on the second tower.
The Spiderbeam has 3 full size elements on 20m and 15m with 4 elements on 10m, clearly I needn’t have bothered with the 10m part of the antenna, nothing was heard apart from the local VK6 HQ station. I can’t quite remember another BERU where 10m sounded so dead.
For LF receive I have 2 beverages, 600 ft long, one for EU and the other for USA. Also a Beverage on ground about 280 ft for signals coming in from the North.
Conditions for 80m and 40m overall seemed quite good, I think my QSO totals on those 2 bands are probably the best I have achieved. Started working G’s before 1530z on 40m and 80m opened up nicely about 30 mins before sunset in UK.
On HF it was a bit of a different story, even on 20m the signals were well down, although I did get a small opening on 15m to UK at around 1130z. After sunrise on the Sunday here, apart from the initial activity inter VK/ZL, the rest of the day was a struggle until a late LP opening to UK on 20m with weak signals at about 0800z and some welcome activity again on 40m towards the end with some more bonus points.
I made many visits to 10m, also moving others there, all to no avail.
The poor HF conditions were offset somewhat by the extra activity of the HQ stations and many thanks to those that took part and activated these stations, the bonus points were very welcome.
The Icom IC7610 with dual receivers and bandscopes, plus the external monitor was really useful for monitoring the other band activity and quickly working needed stations on another band without leaving a run frequency. I have it setup as SO2V and this works seamlessly with N1MM +
80: 67/35
40: 239/69
20: 83/49
15: 58/20
10: 1/1
448 QSO’s
5720 Points
73’s Kevin, VK6LW