Quite a lovely day yesterday with lots of sunshine. When I walked out of my home in the afternoon I was approached by 2 guys that were looking at my antenna tower. “Amateur radio, sir?”. He showed me the callsign badge on his shirt. I intruced myself and the French hams insisted to make a picture of us together with the hexbeam tower in the background. True ham spirit! Unfortunately I forgot to write down their callsigns. When I walked back they were already gone. Hopefully they will send me a copy of the picture. After midnight I made a some contacts on 20 meters. Propagation to the Carribean was excellent and my QSO with Edwin HI3K from the Dominican Republic added another worked country to my list!
Tag Archives: hex beam
Antenna talk with EA4GLI
Sometimes QSO’s are noteworthy, and so was the exceptionally nice hour long chat with Salvador EA4GLI from Madrid, Spain last night. He normally operates from Barbados with call 8P9EH and is also an avid Hex Beam user. We discussed Hex Beams and the Wellbrook ALA-1530 Loop antenna as a RX only solution in environments with lots of electrical interference from Chinese power supplies and solar panel inverters, like in our case. Quite a breeze from the usual “5/9 – 73’s” QSO’s. Thanks, Sal!
Antenna maintenance, new tower
So I will be QRT for a few weeks. Next saturday I am going to remove my hex-beam for maintenance & reinforcement work. We had many stormy days over the past month, some of them 60mph+ and although the hex survived, it needs to be re-dressed a bit. The weekend after that I am going to raise my brand new powered 50 foot telescopic aluminium tower with the kind help of the guys from my club.
UPDATE: Mission accomplished see updated picture. Thanks to my friends from the club for helping me raising the mast!