Reached 44 different WWFF nature reserves

Last week I went out to activate two nature parks in the south of The Netherlands. Both had been activated once before but not by me yet. When I uploaded the logs in the evening I found out that this brought my total number of activated (different) nature reserves on 44. This is a magic number in the flora & fauna program.

Obstacles on the way into PAFF-049

This time the activity was not as straight forward as usually as we had stormy weather with very strong gusts of wind. The picture above shows you what the roads looked like on my way into the reserve.
For some reason though the antenna wires remained on the fiberglass mast even though it was rocking and bending like crazy.

I started out in PAFF-049 (Mortelen) on 40m. There was a lot of activity on that band. Then I went up to 20m for again quite a bit of activity. Around noon it was time to pack up and head for the nearby PAFF-059 (Kampina). There I was active mainly on 20m and 40m again. I tried the higher bands but found (almost) no activity there.

Conditions were poor with almost no DX in the log (except for Bill W1OW who always seems to make it across the pond and a few R9 and 4Z).

In the end I did log 280 calls that day - not a bad result especially considering the lousy propagations. I met a lot of familiar people including a lot of the WWFF team members.

Tomorrow Monday December 30 I will be going out again. This time I plan to head into PAFF-063 (Rijk van Nijmegen). I am going to take my hexbeam with me to hopefully work a bit more DX - if I find a suitable place between the trees to set it up and if the wind is not too strong (they forecast stormy conditions again).

Time for some /P PAFF activities again

After a period of far too much distraction from work I have planned two days for /P activities during the holidays: Tuesday December 24 and Monday December 30.

This Tuesday I expect to be able to activate two nature reserves that are part of the PAFF program (PAFF-049 and PAFF-059). The weather forecast is not good with stormy wind and rain but I assume I will be able to set up the wire antennas.

PH0NO's aluminium push up mast

On request of a number of people I added a section about my DIY aluminium push up mast under "PH0NO projects". This mast has allowed me to set up my 4 element 10m yagi and my hexbeam. In this way it is a vital component for my DX fishing.

It is quite heavy and not as practical as a fibreglass pole, but it does allow me to put either (or both) of the beams on considerable height - up to 14m in low wind conditions.

Check out the details here if you are interested.