Brian and I went back to Dave's field this weekend and had a great time. You cannot underestimate the sheer amount of fun to be had with portable radio, especially when it is a shared experience.
One of the things we wanted to achieve this time was to get Brian's station running well. We identified a bad connector from last week and made a couple of leads up to correct the issue. He took the TS480SAT and powered it from his new Beaudens power station.
This little unit performed flawlessly throughout the day, running the radio at 50W SSB quite happily. The great thing is that it is small and light. Absolutely perfect for this kind of operation. If used at QRP levels, it would last ages! At 50W SSB, it would certainly last for most of the day. As it was, less than half of the charge was used.
It proved to be very quiet, RF-wise, which is obviously the main focus for us :). Bear in mind that the radio in use is not the most power efficient portable radio.
The next thing was how well I could put up the BandHopper. This was erected in much less time than the first and will be even quicker next time. Every day is a learning day!
We managed to get the aerials up just before it started to rain. We quickly relocated the radios to the cars and started to operate. The bands were not great, there having been a couple of minor flares, but as our noise floor was zero, it was not a problem from our side. I started on 40m and Brian was on 20m on the Slidewinder.
In fairness, I think I had the best of it. The bands were not great but 40m is usually fairly busy on a Saturday and I had a slow but steady start. 20m was not as good but Brian was managing a few contacts.
Brian was the first to crack and moved his station outside the car and I followed shortly after. We swapped bands, with Brian on 40m on the Slidewinder and me on 20m on the BandHopper. I discovered that I could lower one end of the dipole, keeping the tension on lightly and altering the aerial for 20m. Much quicker than having to drop the mast.
Much hilarity ensued when Brian moved the slider on the Slidewinder and when checked, it was absolutely bang on on 40m!! I bet he couldn't do it again 😆
I then moved to CW and managed a couple of contacts but the bands were closing in a bit and we decided to close down.
What a great day again though. I can really recommend getting out of the house and just having some fun for a few hours in an RF quiet place. You really don't need much to do it. If you make it QRP, you really need very little indeed and you could easily have a full station in a small backpack, as SOTA and WOTA stations know well.
As usual, I made a video of our day. I was using a gimbal for the first timed I definitely need more practice :)
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