Hello, LF
I'm back after the trip to Utö and other vacation travelling.
First our thanks to all that participated in the band activity or sent
reports. Our apologies to those that tried hard but that we could not
complete a QSO with.
We prepared the SW / MF station on friday and had the MF beacon up and
running in the afternoon. Last year we were plagued with lots of
man-made noise on MF so I spent some time tesing out what readily
available antenna groundings could be used and what to avoid. We ended
up using mostly own radials and a few old NDB radials were also
extended to reach the old NDB antenna foundation. This came at a
price, our total antenna impedance ended up being 50 ohms instead of
earlier 35 ohms, but daytime reception showed a substantial reception
improvement. Hopes were high to hear better this year...
But no, in the early evenings as air temeratures dropped a bit,
cumulunimbus started forming over the warm Baltic sea and as
propagation started the band already sounded like paper being ripped
with the S-meter mostly pegged at S9. Signals were clearly heard but
were very hard to copy. At some point after local midnight my ears and
brain simply gave up and there was no other CW operator to step up and
try to continue for a while more. Due to late cancellations we only
had two operators to run the whole SW / MF operation.
It is interesting to note that the beacon was heard on sky-wave well
before there was any sign of useful signal levels at our end. The
beacon was primarily intended for generating some ground wave reports
by NDB:ers and also other hams with "talkback" on 80m. Last but not
least to honor the NDB "UÖ" that once radiated it's signal from the
very same spot. 472,5 kHz was chosen for both modes as antenna
re-tuning was pretty tricky with a large variometer doing all the
loading, a vernier reduction gear is in planning for future operations.
I will upload a few new pictures from this year to the finnish
utility-forum later on. A link to the forum thread will then be
provided here.
Please QSP to Yahoo LF and NDB groups.
On behalf of OH1AH
Paul-Henrik, OH1LSQ
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