2M SOTA Dipole.

I have knocked together a home-brew 2M dipole to strap to the rucksack/tent when out and about.

Made from plastic tubing, some copper earth wire, electrical screw terminals and RG58. I added 5 or so turns of co-ax as a balun. SWR is very low with the reflected power almost not registering in the meter.


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The History of this Radio Tower...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident

The Gleiwitz incident was a staged attack by Nazi forces posing as Poles on 31 August 1939, against the German radio station Sender Gleiwitz in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, Germany (since 1945: Gliwice, Poland) on the eve of World War II in Europe.
This provocation was the best-known of several actions in Operation Himmler, a series of unconventional operations undertaken by the SS in order to serve specific propaganda goals of Nazi Germany at the outbreak of the war. It was intended to create the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany in order to justify the subsequent invasion of Poland.

Buddies in the Caribbean - Dominica.

/P (kind of) in the garden...

Had some spare time this morning so setup the Buddipole (with a repaired whip as I'm still waiting for the new delivery from the USA) in the garden. It was a nippy 4 deg's with a bit of a breeze. Didn't use a tuner, just used the MFJ antenna analyser to ensure lowest SWR on the Buddipole.I was specifically listening out for EC1CW on 14.285 as he was due to activate EA1/CR-001 - Buño, but I didn't hear him. Maybe another day. However, his SOTA patches are great! I bought two off him and the quality is superb. See below.

The FT-857D and associated gubbins in the garden today...

 EC1CW -Diago's SOTA Patches all the way from Spain

Anyway, I was able to work the following on 20M:

Date/Time              DE         Band     Freq    Mode    Op        
2011-01-30 13:15:00    RT3LA      20m      14.255  SSB     Mikhail V. Bogomoltsev
2011-01-30 12:58:00    LZ2ZY      20m      14.309  SSB     Radoslav (Rady) Nikolov
2011-01-30 12:49:00    OK4PA      20m      14.274  SSB     Pavel Prihoda       
2011-01-30 12:18:00    RV1CB      20m      14.292  SSB     Oleg N. Ignat'ev

Antenna...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT8rTZhtgAI&feature=youtube_gdata_player


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Test Post...

Is this actually working?

My Rockmite 20, built one day over the Christmas Holiday!

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My VX-8GE

Great little dual-band radio with a built-in GPS for APRS operation.