Preparation:

The primary aim of this activation was to give John (VK6NU) a summit-to-summit contact while he was on a summit in Ireland (EI/IE-057) as part of his European trip.

I had planned to go to Wank near Garmisch Partenkirchen as I have not activated that summit this year as yet. Looking at the time involved and the somewhat strenuous last section up to the summit with all the gear, I decided to simply go to the closer Rentschen summit, where one can literally drive on to the summit (it is a plateau).

This would also be another chance to use the new VP2E antenna with its traps fitted, to see how it performs.

I only needed to be on the summit by 11:30am, local time, so I had time to prepare all the gear in the morning. This would be the Xiegu X108G and cable to my Smartphone, so that I can read the display, the 10 metre “mini-mast”, the Surveyors tripod and the 40/20m trapped or linked VP2E wire antenna along with the walking sticks to lift the ends of the antenna.

The Activation:

As I approached Rentschen, I saw a farmer cutting the grass and hoped he hadn’t planned to start on the top field where the actual summit with its trig point stone was. Luckily this did not turn out to be the case.

I set up right at the Trig point marker stone and after some taffling and un-taffling of the antenna wires, I had got the antenna up with the 20 metre traps installed in the antenna – this should make it possible to use the antenna on 40m and 20m without having to lower the antenna to link or unlink sections. I had tried these traps previously using the antenna on 20m and all seemed fine. This time I was going to start on 40m.

Listening around the band, despite all the space weather readings that say it shouldn’t be, the band was nicely active with strong signals coming in up and down the 40m band. I even heard and called GB19DDAY on-board the HMS Belfast ship in the Thames in London, but couldn’t get through all the others calling him. That was a shame as some of the ICQPodcast team volunteer on the HMS Belfast some weekends. But it wasn’t to be.

My first contact after spotting myself on SOTAWatch was Lucas ON3YB and although he was a strong 5-9 signal, his report back to me was only 2-2. I suspected the traps and so I asked him to wait until I removed them. I lowered the antenna, unplugged the traps and plugged the links for 40m through and put everything back up. Unfortunately, by this time Lucas had gone, but most of the following contacts got reports between 5-5 and 5-9 which is more what I would expect, so it does seem the traps degrade the antenna considerably. to be sure, however I’ll need to do more tests.

Mixed into my 17 contacts on this activation, I had 8 Summit-to-summit (S2S) contacts, including the planned one with John VK6NU in Ireland and Mike 2E0YYY/P who was out for the same reason and Luc ON7DQ who is on his way down to Friedrichshafen for the HAM RADIO show at the end of the week. I also talked to a few people who I plan to see at FN in a few days.

After an hours operating I got a problem that I switched the receive filter to the 500Hz CW position and while I could not read the display and the filter setting cannot be changed via the CiV remote control commands from my phone on this rig, I decided to pack up and call it a day with a nice list of contacts in the bag.

Photos:

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Equipment:

Xiegu X108G.

Battery box (2 x 5000maH hardcase LIPOs).

VP2E (Vertically polarised, 2 element, 20m wire antenna).

Surveyors tripod.

10 metre DX-Wire fibreglass portable mast.

Thick plastic painters sheet.

Smartphone PocketRxTx App and USB cable.

Log:

Conclusions:

The propagation was better than was expected and reflected in the number of S2S contacts made. Some of them from stations that I would not normally hear because of skip distance. There was deep QSB on the band, so perhaps this was Sporadic-E ? whatever it was, it was a nice activation, making several nice contacts including the one with John VK6NU, which was the purpose of the activation.

The VP2E antenna performed well once the traps were out of the circuit. The SWR this time showed between 1:1 and 1.1:1 so it looks that raising the ends with the walking poles is a good move.

The problem at the very end of the activation, where I pressed a button in error and switched to the CW filter may be able to be fixed by using a special initialisation string in the remote control software that runs on the smartphone. I will take a look at this.

73 ’til the next Summit!