After our last visit to Crete Isl. ( SV9 ) in 2000, we decide to visit another DXCC country and my thoughts fell to Kos SV5.

But this was a sort of last minute decision so i didn’t had much time to ask for permission to transmit from the Hotel. And of course I token my radio gear with me. We stayed in hotel Astron, who is located in the Harbour. Our room was on the main floor, it’s a hotel with three storage's and a iron fence on top of the hotel.

My equipment: FT- 897 , a G5RV 6/80m(borrowed from PA4JJ) and CT loggingsoftware. The feeder of the antenna was 10.30m, so it was just as long as the height of the Hotel.

I started transmitting after the 5 th day of my spare time....hi, my XYL was reading a book, so that gave me the opportunity to give it a go. The 20m band worked well and also 17m did well, worked many stations from Russia and Japan. The antenna didn’t resonate well on the other bands, and due my low power (50wtt) and bad swr i decide to work most on these bands. Next year i will bring a tuner and we will ask for room nr 23, then i have the opportunity to connect the antenna 2m higher. It was now to close by the ground and the dipoles were to close to the fence. But i had great fun and i made 650 QSO's in CW and 50 RTTY qso’s .

We had a great time there and the people were very friendly. And of course we had every day clear blue sky, nice weather for swimming seawater temperature was 26 dgr.

I will thank the hotel manager from Astron. We want to book early next year to be sure to get room nr. 23.

QSL is ok via the bureau.

Henk pa3gcv