Saturday 27 December 2014

A little post-Christmas HF QRP activity

Thought I would fire up my little three-band Steve Weber-designed MTR Mountain Topper radio for a bit of QRP fun this afternoon.

In a couple of hours I worked SP3JFK, 9A0QRP, OM5WW, HB9DAX and OK1DMP on 20m around the 14.060 MHz QRP calling frequency.

So that's Poland, Croatia, Slovakia, Switzerland and Czech Republic while running about 2.5W to a wire dipole at 25ft. More than happy with that!

What an amazing little radio.

On Monday 29th I thought I would give my Yaesu FT-817 an airing too with 5W CW and power from a small LiPo battery at about 11V.

Worked UR5AF, DK2BSN, S507PMC, KA5CJJ and EW7BW, adding Ukraine, Germany, Slovenia, USA (Texas) and Belarus to the total.

KA5CJJ was a tough one on 10m (all the others were 20m) as the band was closing. Allen was in Texas and running QRP too.

The FT-817 is another great little QRP radio.

Finished off the G-QRP Club Winter Sports on 31st December with my Icom IC-756 Pro 3 set at 5W with OF9X (Santa Claus SES in Finland), EA2BD/P (Ignacio in Spain), UT2QA (Peter in Ukraine) and TF3CW (Siggi in Iceland). Life's obviously not too short for QRP!