A quick update for anyone wondering how we got on at the weekend.
Blessed by the weather once again, I turned up at about 10am with a car full of stuff and the keys to an actual windmill!
I'd scoped out the site both on satellite maps and in-person a couple of weeks before, and discovered that there was really nothing to attach an antenna or mast to anywhere. Not to be deterred, I figured that if push came to shove, I'd just run a Hamstick on the car, or a vertical 17' stainless telescopic quarter-wave and loading coil. I'd already decided that I was going to focus almost exclusively on 40m to keep things simple. Anyway, the short version is that I spent most of the day either chatting to people, or putting antennas up and down. That's just the way it goes sometimes. Two members from the mill society showed up and were both really nice chaps (Chris and John), and were genuinely glad that the mill was being activated again. My pleasure, and it was an honour.
40m wasn't really playing ball, coming and going as it does some days.
I went with the telescopic whip to start with, as it's easy to deploy with a handful of radials, but with the site layout as it is, I had to run 20m of RG8 coax out the door of the windmill and into a 'safe' corner where I could tape-off the area and put up all the blessed safety signs. I know. I spent more time putting up warning tape than anything else.
Turns out, that hidden in the trees in an adjacent garden was a power distribution pole which destroyed reception on the band. I eventually gave that up as a bad job, but then Chris M7VJE turned up, which made things much easier - and we managed to get a sort-of-ok EFHW up by utilising a distant tree and a 10m mast on my drive-on mount. A bit sketchy, but the interference was gone.
Unfortunately, so was the general reception. I did work about a dozen stations on SSB with the help of George G4PTJ, who called in, and then spent a while spotting us on the cluster and relaying messages from stations that could hear us, but which we were totally unable to decipher sufficiently. Thanks for trying George.
Chris stayed around for a few hours, and then Dick G1AFU turned up. We chatted for quite a while, and then at about 5 o'clock I decided to start clearing up and packing away.
Once I was left with just the antenna up, I changed my mind and decided to work on into the evening, as I really wanted to get the SES callsign for Gavin on the air properly and into some logbooks. I switched to FT8 and stayed until the light started going at around 8:00pm. I'm glad I did, and I finished the day with 65 QSOs, which I was happy with.
I had a fun day in the sunshine, and that's all that matters really. Thanks to everyone that checked-in or stopped by for a chinwag.
73,
Berni M0XYF
