Saturday, March 3, 2012

Activating PAFF-034 Leende

Short activation of a new PAFF area

A customer appointment in the morning brought me close to Leende. The nature park borders on Belgium in an area I don't visit normally. With another appointment later in the afternoon I had only about 90 minutes for the activation but PAFF-034 really needed to be activated in my opinion.



The park is quite large and has a few open patches that are convenient for a portable radio station. The northern part of the park is partily accessible by car.

With the limited time available I decided to erect the wire antenna only once. This meant choosing my multi band end fed wire for 10-20-40m and attaching it to my extended Spieth mast of 15m. Luckily there was only a light breeze.

Cloudy but dry weather @ PAFF-034
At noon UTC 10m was rather dead so I started on 20m. After sending a spot to the cluster Luciano I5FLN was (as usual) the first one I could greet. The first 30 minutes on 20m were really busy with more than 60 calls logged.  I had to change frequency once due to QRM. Something that normally happens on 40m.

After 45 minutes the activity level had dropped and I was half way my available time so I changed to 40m. After the first call I was already greeted by Luciano. His spot on the cluster initiated another pileup that lasted 30 minutes. 10 minutes later activity died down so I changed back to 20m to log a few last calls before breaking up and heading north. The QRM level on 40m was very acceptable this time, allowing me to operate on one and the same frequency all the time.

In the 80 minutes of activity (lost about 10 minutes finding and changing frequencies) I logged 118 calls from 28 DXCCs. This includes 7 stations outside EU. It was too early for N-America so all DX is from the east (UA9 and UN). Max QRB was set by a RV9 station on 5000km distance.

The time of this activation is different from most of my other activations (earlier). This must be the reason why more than one third of all logged calls is from OMs I have not met before.

Thanks all for calling in.
Lars, PH0NO/P 

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