Preparation:

A bunker that I proposed about 2 months ago had been authorised in the May updates of DL Bunkers on the Air, so with the wish to be the first activator of this bunker, I scouted out the 1 km activation area. Most of the area is still under military control and only opens to the public once or twice a year to visit this World War II bunker. However, the activation area also goes into the industrial area of Landsberg am Lech, and I found a place there on the map where I could park and operate from, inside the car. As usual, the normal configuration (G90 plus HF-PRO2) were loaded into the car the day before the activation.

Up until now, I had combined my DL-BOTA activations with POTA ones. This would be my first “pure-Bunker” activation.

The Activation

BOTA B/DL-1194

The activation spot is a 14-minute drive away from my home, so it’s not a long drive. I did want to get started early for some possible long path contacts into VK & ZL, so I left home at 05:30 UTC (7:30 am local) and was set up and on-air by 05:50 UTC. The first station I heard when tuning around on 20m was NP2OJ maritime mobile in the Caribbean. He was strong, but unfortunately, he did not hear me calling him. It would have been a great contact to start the log with, but despite the 20m band being open for at least 4 hours from Europe to Australia/New Zealand, I was not able to get any contacts “down under” today. Being a Saturday, even the VKs and ZLs that I was hearing at a true 59 signal level were not open to me, as other high-power stations with beams would always get in first. My little 20w SSB and loaded whip station was definitely getting signals down there, but I was simply being swamped by others. This is the advantage of having skeds with friends in VK. Unfortunately, none were available on this day. Radio conditions had been very difficult for DX over the last few days, so the temptation for portable low-power stations to go out on this Saturday was greatly reduced. It’s a shame as the 20m band was certainly performing very well.

I spotted myself on both the WW-BOTA cluster and the DX cluster, but had great difficulties getting any callers on 20m or 40m, so many of my contacts were “hunt & pounce” – i.e. look for others calling CQ and call them as “a contact is a contact”, it doesn’t have to be with someone hunting bunkers. In the Bunker scheme it is more difficult to qualify a site as it needs to have 15 contacts, not the 10 for POTA or 4 for SOTA, GMA or HEMA. Initially, I tried calling CQ and also searching on 20 & 40m, and I slowly got some contacts in the log. My rescue was when the POTA activators appeared to have got to their sites a little later, I was able to hunt them and build up my contacts score – ending with 16 contacts, just one more than the minimum needed. Out of those contacts, I think 3 or possibly 4 were Bunker hunters, 3 were special Event stations, and five were POTA activators.

The activation did not run without its problems, though. Possibly as the car had heated up in the 2.5 hours of operation, but at one point, in the middle of a CQ call, all power disappeared, and after disconnecting and reconnecting the power leads to the LifePO4 battery, the radio had reset itself to factory defaults. This power outage, luckily, only happened once. I also had to restart my smartphone a few times as one of the spotting programs (presumably the WW-BOTA one, as I hadn’t used that before) caused the screen to stop taking any presses of on-screen functions, and the only action was to turn off and restart the phone. This happened three times at least.

Photos:

Equipment taken:

• Xiegu G-90 radio.
• Komunica Power HF-PRO2-PLUS-T loaded vertical antenna.
• Linked dipole antenna (not used).
• 6 metre fibreglass pole (not used).
• 3-magnet car roof mount
• Single magnet mount (not used).
• 8 Ah LifePO4 battery.
• 2 x 4Ah Eremit LifePO4 batteries (not used).
• Lightweight headphones.
• Smartphone for spotting.

Log

Conclusions:

I was surprised at the lack of Bunker hunters, especially as this was a Saturday activation. It’s also disappointing to hear so many stations breaking their licence conditions and using more power than they need to complete a contact. If all were limited to a lower power level, more contacts would take place. The radio waves get everywhere in the world (depending upon frequency and propagation conditions) whether sent with 1W or 1 kW. It’s only that the quieter signals cannot be heard because of the high-power stations that not only ruin the frequency that they are on, but also the frequencies at each side of the frequency!

My second takeaway is that at the moment, if I want to activate a Bunker, I should make sure that it is also within a POTA park, to be sure of getting enough contacts in the log. This used to be the case for POTA, where SOTA was the fallback scheme to get contacts at a combined location (many POTA trails run over the smaller SOTA summits).

73 ’til the next activation!