5B/VK2JI/P – September 11th – 16th 2023 – Cyprus Mini-DXpedition with SOTA, POTA & HEMA activations.

Preparation:

I accepted an invitation to the wedding of a radio amateur I have known since my time in Australia and as he was marrying his English lady on the Island of Cyprus. I, of course, could not miss this opportunity to operate a portable radio station from the island in the Mediterranean Sea where I had never been before. I decided this would be a series of activations in HEMA, POTA and SOTA (I suppose I could also have classified this as an IOTA expedition as well as the Island has its own IOTA number (AS-004)). Interestingly in contests, it counts as being part of Asia, a point that makes it attractive to European contest stations who often operate from Cyprus to get continental multipliers for the easy European contacts.

I would be on Cyprus for exactly a week, so I planned 2 activations every couple of days around some other holiday activities and of course the wedding!

I arrived and left on Sunday, so those days were out but Monday was planned for POTA, Wednesday for HEMA and Friday for SOTA with Saturday left initially free for a possible POTA “2-Fer” activation in the town of Paphos where I was staying.

The Activations

Monday 11th September – POTA.

Firstly a POTA park to the northwest of Paphos – 5B-0114 Tombs of the Kings.

This park was literally 15 minutes drive from where I was staying and as the car park is officially within the park grounds, this was a simple, from-the-car, activation using the HF-PRO2 loaded whip on a small magnetic mount on top of the hire car.

Upon unpacking the equipment from my small rucksack to set up in the car I found that one side of my small transportable JVC headphones had come apart with the foam rubber pushing through the fake leather-looking plastic on the headphones. So the first repair was made using electrician’s tape even before the first contact on the holiday was made.

That first contact though was a good one – Ernie VK3DET was there for me again as he had promised to try to be and a contact with 20W of SSB on 20 metres using a multiband loaded whip on a magnetic mount received a 3-3 report from the land down-under. Ernie was about a 5-4 signal. Surprisingly this was not to be the only contact from VK3 – 25 minutes later David VK3BY from Melbourne replied to my CQ calls and we exchanged 5-3 signal reports. Other countries making up the rest of the twelve contacts (10 contacts are needed to qualify a POTA park) were made up of Italy, Poland, Belgium, Spain, Romania and France.

Radio operation started at 08:45 local time (05:45 UTC) and ran for an hour. By the end of the hour – even with the shade within the car I was feeling the heat, so I packed up and went to walk around the park. For just €2.50 it’s a vast area to look into the various excavated tombs but also as this is on a promontory, to look out to sea with the clear blue waters. I know I only saw possibly half of the park but after about an hour of walking in the heat (wearing my wide-brimmed “Tilley” hat), it was enough, so I headed back to the car and then to the large supermarket for supplies as I was staying in a self-catering apartment,

After the mid-day heat, the afternoon brought another planned POTA park activation. This one needed a 20 km drive to the southeast of Paphos to the Aprrodites Rocks where the forest is a national park and number 5B-0005 Aprodites Rock Forest. The car park for the beach by the rocks is within the forest park area, so this again would be a car-based activation using the same loaded whip on the car roof and 20 watts on 20 metres.

The difference with this activation was that the car was already hot even though it was 3 pm local time, the heat sat in the air and getting the needed number of contacts was more difficult. Add to that an extra complication that the 4AH LifePo battery’s built-in management system decided to cut the power to my radio about halfway through the activation resetting all defaults in the Xiegu G90 radio (which doesn’t like power to be cut without warning).

The black case on the radio is not an advantage in mid-30s (Centigrade) temperatures even though I have covered the top side of the radio with white sticky-backed plastic after a POTA activation in 5B – the case is too hot to touch!

The battery problem was easily resolved in that I have a backup 2AH LifePO battery and once that was connected, I was back on the air to collect more needed contacts.

This time there were no VKs in the log (it would be the middle of the night with them and the long path had long ago closed). Calls came in however from Sweden, Spain, Greece, Italy, France and North Macedonia.

Again this was an hour-long activation from 12:00 – 13:00 UTC and after completing the last call, I packed away the radio gear and headed down to the beach to see what all the fuss about the rocks was – as you will see from the pictures – they are impressive!

It was about a 40-minute drive back to my apartment and time to meet up with the other wedding guests for a meal. After that, I was able to enter my logs into POTA, so that those chasers would already see the contacts logged (in POTA only the activator does the logging work, unlike HEMA and SOTA where both the activator and the chaser have to log the contact).

Wednesday 13th. September – HEMA.

After Tuesday was taken up with a tourist bus tour, Wednesday was planned as a HEMA day with two first activations of summits. Indeed this expedition was the first time ANY HEMA summits have been activated on Cyprus!

The first summit was 5B/HCY-011 Axylon near the village of Aksylou about 20 km northeast of Paphos.

The drive was fairly straightforward however the access track towards the summit quickly gets difficult for a small rental car and with only limited parking possibilities, I decided to park by the village water tower which is within the 25-metre activation zone and with some space to put up the mast and linked dipole antenna this time.

It was 9:15 am local time (06:15 UTC) by the time I had got set up and there he was again – Ernie VK3DET, first into this log as well – making also the first VK – 5B HEMA contact as well as the first contact to an, up to this point, never-activated HEMA summit. From here, with the better antenna, Ernie was 5-8 with me and he gave me a 5-6 report. It’s still quite amazing what can be done with low power and a simple antenna when you are on the air at the right time and propagation is on your side!

The following contact was also a surprise, Andy M7FTM was on his way to work in Dorset, mobile from his car running 10 watts to a whip antenna and coming in at about 5-4 with some QSB.

The following calls were from all over Europe – France, Macedonia, Georgia (country not US state), Russia, Slovenia, Italy and Poland.

I had planned to activate my second HEMA late in the afternoon but as the bridegroom’s stag night was planned for the evening, I decided to head to the 2nd summit from the first hoping that Google Maps on my phone would find the way for me.

It did and by 11:00 am local time (0800 UTC), I arrived at 5B/HCY-001 Trachonas (to find this summit look for Villa Breeze on the map and follow the track past the water tower behind it). The views from this summit are fantastic – the blue Mediterranean Sea and the rolling hills down to it as well as the countryside around are truly beautiful. One thing to beware of however is the undergrowth which consists of mostly prickly weeds. The ground is also very hard and I had to search around to find a spot to put the mast base spike in the ground. Once I had done this I ran out the linked dipole wires across the ground, trying not to tangle them in the spikey plants. I raised the 6m mast up and went back to peg out the antenna elements which also act as guy ropes. In the meantime what had been a nice cooling breeze in the hot sunshine turned into a light wind but even that light wind was enough to blow the mast over. As I went back to the mast, I could see that the mast was fine but the Decathalon peg-based (or De_crap-a-lot as I am now calling equipment from this company) had broken the base support in that the nut, which is only set in plastic with no strengthening, had bent over and could not be simply pushed back as the plastic had broken. This is a horrible design. This same problem has happened to me before but on the advice from several SOTA activators, they said I must have simply got “a bad one” last time, I bought a new one and this is what happened. The design is simply not thought through. De_crap-a-lot, I will not buy from you again!

Of course, I have a backup for such let-downs. I packed the mast and Linked Dipole away and took out the Komunica Power HF-PRO-2-Plus-T loaded whip and my converted photo tripod and radials. Once that was all set up, I could hear a VK6 station still on 20m but with the now limited antenna and late time for the propagation, he could not hear me.

I spotted myself on the HEMA site and the DX-Cluster in the hope of making 4 contacts to make the journey out to this summit worthwhile. After a lot of effort, I managed one WWFF contact and two HEMA-to-SOTA contacts in Greece, Italy (x2), and Austria.

At 12:15 local time, I decided to pack up and head back to the apartment to get something to eat, rest and then prepare for the evening.

Friday 15th September – SOTA

With the wedding now having taken place (a great success, where everything went very well and all were happy if a little drunk later on), Friday would be a SOTA day. I knew that getting contacts would be easier due to the number of chasers that monitor SOTAWatch compared to HEMA and POTA however I would have to rely upon the HF-PRO-2 loaded whip as the antenna. As it was to turn out, it did a great job!

The first SOTA summit of this “Mini-DXpedition” was one with no name 5B/CY-042, which I chose to call Chapel of Agiou Mama as that is a little further down the track, so following signs to the chapel take you to this No-Name summit just south of the village of Koili which is about a 20-minute drive north of Paphos.

It seems that in Cyprus, every summit near a village has a water tower on it as several have and this one also had one. Similar to the ground covering that I found on Wednesday this location also had a lot of prickly plants and the ground was again rock-hard so there was no way that the now fragile, damaged Decathlon mast spike would work here, so I set up the HF-Pro and tripod next to what I think is the pump building, which provided me with a little shade from the sun.

So how well, did this “compromise” antenna work from this small summit? How about a call from Paul VK5PAS in South Australia as the second contact? That, with true 59 / 55 signal reports!

I even managed an S2S contact with Andrew VK1AD/P on his SOTA summit VK1/AC-043 in the Australian Capital Territory.

For all of those who say Life’s too short for QRP – look how just 20 watts of SSB to a loaded vertical whip has performed this week from Cyprus. OK, these were not 59+20 dB reports each way but those reports indicate the stations are breaking their licence rules which clearly state “only use sufficient power to make the contact”. Here 20 watts is getting 55->59 reports from around Europe and 52->55 reports from the other side of the globe!

This set-up provided 17 contacts in 20 minutes from this summit. see the log below for the full details.

Rather than heading back to Paphos and going to my second SOTA summit in the cooler, late afternoon, I decided to head straight on to the SOTA Summit 5B/CY-035 Mazi relying again on the Google Maps app playing through Android Auto in the rental car to get me there.

This time, things did NOT go to plan … The directions were fine until it told me to turn off the main road onto a stone track which was a little wider than the car itself. I did not turn that way thinking that it was wrong and that even if I should have done it, I would be brought back via another route. I carried on and the app kept giving me directions, in this case, it took me onto smaller and smaller roads and eventually after it took obvious “short-cuts” between the more “normal” roads, I knew this was really taking too long for the relatively short distance between the summits. There was no way to turn around, so I decided to follow the first sign that directed me back to Paphos and my apartment and then to “re-group” after something to eat. The route back to Paphos was also “interesting” with the road full of goats with no shepherd to be seen and another place where there were tens of quad bikes heading to some waterfalls. Eventually, I reached Coral Bay, which I knew was up the coast from Paphos. So I eventually found my way back onto known roads after a nearly 2-hour detour.

What had happened was that the phone had lost cell coverage (and hence access to the Internet) just after the track where it wanted me to turn off and although I had downloaded the local region map to the phone, something was not working correctly with that map it seems.

After some food and rest, I decided to try again and this time when I reached the small track (which actually had a sign pointing down it with a road number on it!) – I took it and this was a road NOT to take a hire car down (even the cross-over model – that the rental companies call a mini-SUV, which I had). Part of the route is concreted, part of it is pure stones and part is a mixture of surfaces with potholes everywhere. Steep climbs and drops and bushes sticking out to scratch the car along the route test the driver. Google Maps likes to take short-cuts it seems, which means that you use even smaller roads – at Mazi, it is best to head towards the couple of houses there and then head back along and up to the summit (as I found on the return route back to the main road). In any case, upon arriving, I realised there was NO space to park off the road in what looked like olive plant fields. I did find a road junction and was able to position the car in the corner so that anyone coming along with a smaller vehicle would be able to get past. I hoped that no tractors or larger trucks would arrive while I was operating – luckily no one came by.

I clambered up the soil wall at the side of the road and found a spot where I could put down my painter’s sheet to sit on and again set up the tripod and HF-PRO-2. Even with a working mast peg, this would not have been the place to put up the linked dipole antenna because of lack of space.

Once set up and self-spotted on SOTAWatch, I had a constant flow of calls (24 in 14 minutes) – no Intercontinental DX this time but calls from all around Europe and two SOTA S2S contacts – see the log below for details.

Getting to this summit took some doing. Going there again, if I ever get a chance to return to Cyprus, would of course be easier – for those reading this report while planning your activation of Mazi, I hope these tips will help.

At the end of the day, this activation again amazed me as to what is possible with low power and a simple antenna system. I was glad to get back to the apartment that evening for a rest.

That was supposed to be the last activation of the holiday but as the bridegroom wanted to work some HF and I had a “backup” POTA “2-fer” ready to cover if the others had not worked out, we decided to play some radio on Saturday…

Saturday 16th September – POTA 2-Fer?

After a late breakfast, Adrian M0GLJ and I headed over to the Paphos Archaeological Reserve POTA 5B-0113 and after paying the €4.50 entrance fee headed through the park towards the Paphos Liighthouse POTA 5B-0067 and found a shaded area in the lighthouse area.

This was to be the same set-up as on the previous activation, the HF-PRO2 antenna on the tripod with the radial wires laid out roughly around the base. I set the slider on the antenna to the position for 20 metres, connected everything up and tuned the band. It was very quiet. I checked all connections and even ran the ATU in the radio, no difference. I did find one Italian station and called him but while he could hear me, we could not make a full contact. This was a Saturday morning, the band would normally be full of stations. Tuning up and down the band, I could hear blips at irregular intervals but no more stations.

I decided to switch to 40 metres reset the antenna and tuned around there – nothing, not one station!

I wondered whether the radio was faulty in some way but all seemed fine – I changed AGC settings pre-amp settings and all made no difference. This demonstration activation of HF radio was certainly not going the way I had hoped. Adrian had his Yaesu HT along and had found the local FM repeater. He put a call through there but no one came back.

Then I thought I might know what had happened. On Cyprus there is a UK Royal Airforce base which has a Megawatt over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) station – if that was operating, it could flatten all receivers in a several hundred kilometres radius and we were probably 45 km away, from where we were.

I decided if that was the case, we had no chance and we both decided to call it a day with the radio, take a look at some of the excurvations on the way out and then head for Coral Bay for lunch.

As it turned out, checking the propagation reports that evening, there had been a series of HF radio blackouts at around the time we were trying to operate. While conditions during the week had been so good up to that point, it hadn’t crossed my mind that what we had was, in fact, a radio blackout, which it seems was in fact the case. Just unlucky timing on our part!

It would have been nice to have activated the “two parks in one” 2-Fer POTA location but I can only say that the rest of the activations went off very well despite a couple of problems and Saturday was just “one of those things”.

Sunday, I flew back home to Germany.