Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Activating PAFF-016 - Sallandse Heuvelrug

Weak conditions on higher bands, good conditions and QRM on 40m

A gap in my schedule allowed for a short detour into PAFF-016. The weather was not too good for a field day with drizzle throughout the afternoon but there was no wind - a good thing for my fiber glass antenna pole.



PAFF-016 is a reasonably large park with a lot of trees but also some clear areas. I found a suitable site quite quickly in the southern part of the park. Looking at the cluster I saw that the higher bands were very quiet so I installed my 12m long multi band end fed wire on my 15m pole focusing on 20m and 40m.

Drizzle @ PAFF-016

Starting on 20m it turned out that conditions were indeed quite poor. I spoke to 40 OMs in 45 minutes.
On 40m the situation was quite familiar: good conditions but lots of QRM and QRN. I worked 80 stations in just over one hour. At the end the interference was so strong I had to change frequency a number of times.
When the QRN started to annoy me just a bit too much I went back to 20m to work another 20 stations in the last 20 minutes of my activation.

All in all a nice activation that only lacked a bit of sunshine. I worked 140 stations from 29 DXCCs in just under 2,5 hours. The DX traffic was limited to 6 stations outside of EU. Maximum QRB was into W1.

Both Luciano I5FLN and Carlo IZ0IJC came by on both bands.

One little problem surfaced during this activation: my logging software did not record the time stamps. I only found this out one hour from that start. In the mean time I have been able to update the log through email or eqsl.

Thanks all for giving ur reports.
Lars, PH0NO/P 

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