SV5/G0HAS PAGE 2

On the Friday morning we took a drive around the island on our way to Rhodes, the centre of the island was deserted, the scenery spectacular and the views magnificent, the north coast was stunning, clouds climbing from the sea over the cliffs to the mountains, the air was warm and moist and you could smell the pine in the air from the forests, a stark contrast to the sun soaked and bleached south side of the island.

The photo to the left shows the view from just below the club, taking in the Temple of Apollo and take off to the east across the town and port areas.

So onto the aerials and the problems, it transpired that the rotator, which had been recently repaired had broken again and was off site awaiting treatment. The beam had been locked in position facing east, not an ideal direction. There was only one thing for it, up the tower, move the beam northwest towards Europe and onwards to North America and hope some sort of manual rotation method could be rigged up for the contest. Unfortunately at 50 foot in the air I could not see any sensible way of rotating the antenna, so it was fixed in this direction for the whole contest. The only hope of working in other directions was the wire dipoles, slightly inverted they should provide some contacts in other directions.

So onto the equipment, the main radio was a Kenwood TS870, the Icom 706 was used as a spotting receiver, the tribander was the main transmitting aerial, with the inverted v dipole as the secondary, a long wire was used for the 706 for rx and a homebrew audio combiner/splitter used to feed rx audio from both radios to the headphones and control tx/rx operation, a MFJ CQ caller was used with the TS870. A laptop was used for logging with CT contest logger.

This is Mike SV5BYR, testing the station out with a few calls, its surprising how a quiet band can produce a pile up after a few QSOs. Mike was an extremely good operator and I had never heard someone talk so fast, logging twenty or so contacts in around five minutes.