A bit late with this post.. Last weekend Myself Nigel M0NRG, Steve 2E0OWI, Neil M0CJM, Sri 2E0LKA met up at Teglease down on the Southdowns for a Sunday Morning social. On the way in it was quite sunny but as the morning progressed the sky turned grey and the sun disappeared, this didn’t detract from pleasant morning consisting of food, chat, good company and of course radio.
Todays kit consisted of the Yaesu FT891, Mat 30 Tuner and a Chameleon Delta loop mast mounted.
We did a partial WWFF activation of GFF-0018 Southdowns National Park and then some casual radio contacts.
26 in the log for the activation and a few others across the guys afterwards.
Rain and possible lightning was advertised for that afternoon so we were packed away by lunchtime just prior to the rain starting.
After far too long a period of no WWFF or walk in /P activations I gave myself a kick up the backside this weekend and activated GFF-0535 Emer Bog SAC. This activation only appeared and became valid on the WWFF directory on the 18th February 2025 which meant I was the first station to activate this reference, this is a first for me.
A good friend and fellow Ham Stephen 2E0OWI accompanied me on this activation. The site was wet, damp and chilly but it was a Bog after all so no complaints. Its been a while since we have carried out a walk in activation, we have carried out most of our recent /P work from the comfort of a truck so I had to put a portable station together that fitted in my backpack..
The kit list was as follows: Yaesu FT891 Slidewinder Antenna LiPo Battery Messi & Paoloni Ultraflex 7
For logging I have been using Ham2K portable logger which you can find here I have been using Ham2K for casual logging when we have been operating portable but had never used it in a pile-up situation prior to todays activation, I have to say I wasn’t disappointed. I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to populate the fields in the logbook using a tablet under the fast moving conditions of a pile-up but my concerns were soon put to rest. A nice feature of the logbook is the notification that you have worked that same station on a different band in the same session, this enables you to greet the station your working again a little more personally. When you come to export your log for upload to WWFF, as long as you have selected the activation as WWFF it can be exported in the correct required format which is another convenient time saver.
I worked the 20m and 17m bands ending with 65 QSOs in the log overall. 20m was hard work due to heavy QRM as there was contest that was on.
