Preparation:

Each year I try to take part in the International Lighthouse and Lightship weekend (www.illw.net) however over the COVID years was not able to and although last year I was staying in Lindau (where the only two lighthouses within a reasonable distance from my home are) I got food poisoning and had to return home before I could even set-up in the park. This year I decided not to risk the expense of a hotel room and rather drive the 1.5-2 hours down on either the Saturday or the Sunday of the event – depending upon what the weather did (which has been very unpredictable of late).

Since last year, the large car park on Lindau Island where I would normally park, has been closed. Street parking is limited to 30 minutes in most places and in a few up to 90 minutes. I expected to need 3-4 hours of parking time.  This is a deliberate action by the council as they want to reduce the number of visitors on the island in cars and rather have them park on the mainland and take a bus (not free in either case). There is however one multi-storey, public car park belonging to the Sports Centre. This of course fills quickly and is not located close to the park between the two lighthouses where I wanted to set up to activate. 

Searching around, I found another option – the station car park, while small (and with 70% of the spots reserved for long-term renters as it turned out) but is relatively close to “my” park. The best way to use this is to check in on arrival using a smartphone App and at €2.50 / hour, the price is “OK” – cheaper than the sports centre. It also has the advantage that as the end of your booked time approaches you are sent an alert with an invitation to extend for another hour (or more).

So my plan was set – drive down early to avoid traffic on the Autobahn, hope to get a spot in the Railway station car park with a fall-back of the Sports Centre and pack all of the radio gear as usual into my 40L rucksack, but then mount this on my shopping trolley frame so that I can pull everything behind me.

To make sure I had everything packed that was needed I went out on Friday morning, just to a spot in the fields where I can park the car outside of the village where I live.

Rather than taking some extra support such as a screw-in base or a tripod, I wanted to use the shopping trolley as the mast support. My original plan was to use it with my 10 metre mast but the tests on Friday morning showed that was not going to work with it falling over before I could get the Inverted-V antenna pinned out. So a switch to one of my old reliable 6-metre masts was made and that was supported well by the trolley.

 After the test run, the gear was packed up and taken home, the LifePO battery “topped off” and everything was packed in the back of the car ready for a 5:30am start on Saturday morning!

The Activation

ILLW DE-0138 and DE-0140

After having a good drive down to Lindau, arriving 20 minutes earlier than expected, I managed to get one of the only three empty parking spots at the railway station. It’s strange not putting a paper ticket on the windscreen but I went through the steps in the app as advised and it all functioned as it should. From the GPS in my phone, it knew which car park I was at and I booked 4 hours (I expected to need about 3.5 hours, so a little more to cover any problems, was probably wise).

The walk around the harbour to Römerschanze Park pulling my little trolley only took about 10 minutes but in that time the trolley lost one of its mudguards never to be seen again (I checked on the way back but I think the street cleaners will have cleaned it up in the meantime). 

On arriving in the park apart from a couple of lads in one corner chatting away, it was empty – which, apart from visiting dogs (and their owners) was the story of my stay. Although there were some tourists later, none of them were brave enough to come and ask what I was doing.

I had also brought along a small fisherman’s tent (more of a sunshade) which as the weather looked like it was going to be a hot and sunny day could give me protection if needed. I decided to leave that until I had set up my antenna and radio and as it happened, I was able to get enough shade from the trees above me that I never unpacked the tent.

The antenna (a linked dipole in an Inverted-V configuration) went up without any problems, with the mast supported by the shopping trolley and I managed to peg the ends of the cords without going outside of the grassed area. This is where with the 10 metre mast, I would have needed less space but in the whole time I was there, I only had to call out once to warn someone before they almost walked into the antenna.

It was still early enough for the 20m long path into Australia and New Zealand and indeed I heard one ZL and several VK stations but trying to call them with just 20w and a wire at 5 metres above ground was difficult. I could not get a chance of a contact due to the QRO home stations with their beams. It was obvious that my signal was able to get to VK however as I had done so on my trial run on Friday morning and there were a couple of QRO UK stations who would deliberately call at the end of my call so that, they knew I was calling and if I were to get a response from the VK station I would not hear it. This used to be the behaviour of some Continental hams, now it seems the M and even the G calls are the worst. Shame on you UK Hams – you know who you are!

Indeed high power stations either calling over the top, splattering nearby or simply calling CQ on top of a frequency where I was working a station became the norm during the day. This often happens when a major contest is on however it seems now that even without a major contest, so many stations simply behave badly on a weekend. It may be a reflection on the times that we live in rather than only being a problem in the Ham radio community but it’s there. It may only be a small percentage of hams but it seems to be spreading, like their over-modulated signals.

My best DX was W1AW/1 in Vermont, where I believe there may have been a QSO party (contest) going on – he gave me a 59 report but I suspect I was nothing like that. Other than that in the three hours of operation, I got many contacts from around Europe on both 20 and 40 metres. Of those however only four were lighthouse-to-lighthouse contacts – I heard and tried to call over 10 different lighthouse stations but again we got the “I don’t care about you low power portable stations, I WANT this contact” attitude from many home QRO stations.

 When I managed to find a free frequency (which was not easy), I would listen specifically for other lighthouse stations to give them priority. Unfortunately, it seems most of the operators at the Lighthouse stations just considered the field-day station as a special event station to work lots of stations from and did not think so much about the Lighthouse-to-Lighthouse contact component of the event.

I will ask for something to be put on the ILLW website requesting lighthouse stations to specifically listen every 15 or 20 minutes for other lighthouse stations, rather than just going back to the strongest station in the “rabble”. Such L2L-like actions are common in SOTA, WWFF, HEMA, POTA and GMA so why not in ILLW?

 After three hours and about two pages of contacts (and the need for a bathroom visit), I decided to call it a day and pack up and head back to the car.

The use of the shopping trolley/rucksack combination works well when wanting to pack up as well as when setting up and it took no time at all to get everything packed and leave the park.  As I said earlier, I looked for the missing mudflap on my way back to the car but it had gone. A shame as it stopped the trolley wheel from rubbing on the rucksack.

As I left the car park, there was a VERY HAPPY driver there to take up the now one available parking spot in the railway station car park!

 Photos:

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Equipment taken:

• Xiegu G-90 20w HF radio.
• Lambdahalbe 6m mast.
• SOTABeams linked dipole antenna (modified).
• Komunica Power HF-Pro2 loaded vertical antenna and tripod (not used).
• 4Ah Eremit LifePO4 battery.
• 4 Ah 3S LiHV battery (not used).
• Lightweight headphones.
• Smartphone for spotting.
• Shopping trolley with 40L rucksack.

Conclusions:

• The shopping trolley as a method of transporting all equipment in one go is a good solution – now that it lacks one mudguard it will need to be modified to lift the rucksack up a little.
• For a single-person activation of two lighthouses, I think I did well, however, it could have been a lot better had the lighthouse stations specifically listened for other lighthouse stations. The abuse of the bands by the QRO stations is not going to go away, so if an event must be on a weekend when there are many more of these animals around, some process needs to be put in place to allow the contacts that the event is set up to promote (in this case Lighthouse-to-Lighthouse) to take place.

73 ’til the next activation!