The OE activity of July 31 was a joint effort of the members of the local chapter of the OeVSV (ADL 511) in the city of Voecklabruck. As in previous years we had our club's summer field day in Schildorn at the home of Ossi, OE5ODL, and his YL Lydia, OE5LMO. It's a hill top QTH in JN68RF with a great view of the surrounding country side of the Innviertel. People came after lunch and set up several stations. There was a barbecue in the late afternoon and a social program till late night.

At our summer field day we usually show and test the previous years yield on finished home-brew projects. This years main activity was focused to get on 136kHz. Our host Ossi had already set up an antenna he called a 470 meter Marconi. Its entirely a wire antenna running 13m vertically up a wooden pole then 40m horizontally to another wooden mast on the rooftop. >From there it runs to a loading coil on top of the garden house with 14 turns of 16m (square coil with 4 meters on each side). From there it runs back to the house and is connected to a 80m horizontal loop in abt 13m height whose ends are tied together as a capacitive load. The total length of wire is about 470 meters. As counterpoise there were several radials laid out on the ground ranging from 20 to 100m and the lightning ground, rain gutters and down spouts were all tied together. The site looked like a copper mine after this installation. I will publish a drawing of this antenna and photos from the field day on my web site <www.qsl.net/oe5eep>.

I have built the transmitter after schematics from Dave's, G3YXM, web site <www.picks.force9.co.uk/136.htm>. Thanks Dave for your support and all your e-mails! Without your help the transmitter would not have been ready in time for the field day. Peter, OE5PGL, built the VFO and added the finishing touches to my breadboard constructed transmitter. He also built a preselector/preamplifier.

The receiver was an FT1000MP. Although one of the better Japanese black boxes it was not sensitive enough for LF. A converter was supplied by Josef, OE5RJL, during the afternoon and substantially improved the S/N ratio. We also had a military surplus LF receiver of WW2 "Langwellen Anton". Although the FT1000MP had about ten times more knobs and switches on its front panel the 55-year-old Langwellen Anton performed better regarding sensitivity. The plus of the FT1000MP was its filters. The station was manned mainly by Peter, OE5PGL, but others also operated from time to time (our host OE5ODL, OE5RJL, ...) Unfortunately I myself could not join the operation because of family duties.

Operation started at 12.45 UTC and DJ1ZB, HaJo was our first QSO. Later we worked DL1SAN from Ulm. There was a rather high noise level in the late afternoon. We could hear several stations calling us but could not establish 2-way QSO's with them. If anybody has copied our signals please let us know via e-mail or via QSL-buro.

Future activities: After some reconstruction of the transmitter, like addition of a high-SWR-protection to the final, inclusion of adequate fuses in the supply line (I blew a power supply when accidentally keying the transmitter in an open load) and last-not-least putting everything in an enclosure we will be back on the air. The antenna is still up (at least until the next storm) and we hope to be on the air on one of next weekends. This time we will start in the early morning hours. I also want to look into computerized reception (want to get those fancy waterfall plots!). We also might build a second transmitter to work from different sites. I will inform about all upcoming activities via this list.

Questions: Does anybody know how to calculate/estimate/measure the efficiency of our wire antenna to determine our ERP power?
Does anybody know of previous OE activities on 136kHz or is ours the very first OE-DL contact as some of our QSO partners say?

So much for today and we'll be back, promise!

73 Heinz