I’ve been staying in Albany over the Easter long weekend and I thought I’d try some portable operation today with the Buddipole antenna. I set up at Lower King by the water this afternoon just before 4:00 pm, with the rig inside the car powered by an external car battery. I set up on 20 metres because 10 sounded fairly quiet.
Initially, I thought I may not have elevated the counterpoise wire sufficiently from the ground (I had suspended it in a shrub) with my first two contacts providing weak signal reports. However, this concern quickly passed after making a number of contacts with good signal reports in countries including Italy, Germany, the UK and Indonesia.
I mainly worked British stations, including three portable operators on the South Coast of England. One of these operators was Pete M3KXZ using just 10 watts from a mobile set up in his car! I ended the afternoon’s contacts with a 5/9 report from Bill, K4VSV in South Carolina which was a good way to end the afternoon.
I took some photographs of the set up which I’ve posted here – please click on the photographs to view a larger version.
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Tagged with: amateur radio • buddipole • Buddipole antenna • mobile • portable • portable radio session
Filed under: Amateur Radio
