Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Activating PAFF-030 Twickel

Single band activation (40m antenna ended up in the tree)

With some time on my hands I headed over to the last unactivated WFF area within one hour drive from where I live: Twickel. The nature reserve consists of various patches of land - mainly covered by trees.
I found an acceptable spot where I could set up the antenna free from tree branches.


Operating spot at Twickel


I started on 20m where activity levels were high - as were the signals. When I started it was still quite early in the afternoon, so I heard a lot more Asiatic Russia (9 in total) than in the last couple of activations.


After about two hours signals started to drop on 20m and I decided to install the 40m wire antenna. This meant extending the antenna pole and getting it up in between the trees again. This turned out to be too great a challenge. I somehow got the antenna wire stuck in between some tree branches. Trying to get the wire out it broke... so much for the 40m activity.

20m antenna just free from branches
All in all I was happy with the result though: 138 QSOs with OMs from 29 different DXCCs. The maximum distance was set by an OM from VE5. I got a lot of new callsigns in my log: 30% of all logged calls were new. This is much higher than in the last couple of activations - and I can't figure out why.

Thanks all for passing by.
Lars, PH0NO/P 

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