Originally posted on 'The wet string chronicles' in March 2009.
The RSGB Commonwealth Contest, for those of you who aren’t amateur radio operators, is a 24 hour morse code contest where the aim is to contact as many stations as possible in countries comprising the British Commonwealth.
I’d been looking forward to this for a while having done well last year in so far as I managed to work 4 all time new ones over the 24 hour period. This weekend however was a bit of a disappointment with most stations of interest either not heard at all or way down in the noise.
I don’t think conditions were great but I attribute the disappointment mostly to my relatively poor antenna compared to last year. My 2008 efforts from a previous residence were assisted by resonant 20m and 40m dipoles. This year at a new QTH I am using a simple random length wire tuned by an antenna tuning unit. This makes for a far less efficient receive and transmit antenna. I think it’s time to explore how I can fit some resonant antennas into my new setup.
No comments:
Post a Comment