A great turnout for the setup of our HF Mills Station on Saturday. Loads of members there, and thanks to everyone who pitched in. Particular thanks to Alan and Stella for dragging the trailer up the hill, to Kim for the loan of the Honda generator and Phil for the loan and setup of his vertical antenna and SGC Smartuner.
Everything was conducted in fabulous sunshine, with a gentle cooling breeze to keep the workcrew fresh. Everything worked perfectly right off the bat.
Apart from the radio.
The club shack's Yaesu FT-847 appeared to be working when tested on AM, but when switched to SSB, there was nothing more than a carrier. That's going to need looking at to see if it can be saved from the 'spares or repair' section of eBay.
Luckily, Alan had also bought along his Icom IC-7100 as backup, and it was quickly pressed into service. It performed well all day, the antenna tuned on every frequency we requested from it (we tried virtually all bands, but quickly settled on 40m and stayed there pretty much all day) and the generator kept up with the demand from the trailer without issue.
The bands weren't really playing ball though. First contact was to Ken G3WYN for a quick test, followed by a good handful of G stations including a sprinkling of MOTA participants.
Things seemed to die-off in the middle of the day, and I'm not sure how the afternoon panned out, as I popped home for lunch before making my way over to Chailey to see how the chaps were getting on over there.
Chailey Heritage Windmill is in a beautiful location up on Red House Common and looked stunning in the afternoon sunshine. If you've never been, make sure you get over there next year. Myself, Merv and Steve all popped in to see Chris, Kevin and Gavin doing well despite the state of the bands (again 40m being the most fruitful) and the delta-loop antenna seemingly reluctant to match particularly well to the radio. That was later traced to a slightly misleading tuner configuration, which just need an inductor adjustment.
GB0CHW achieved a respectable number of QSO's, again with a good few mills in the log, including a few Dutch callsigns.
Thanks again to all the MSARS members that participated, and to the Downland Radio Group for the invite over to Chailey.
Looking forward to next year already, although there are a range of other celebratory xOTA activations going on throughout the summer. Watch this space.
73
Berni M0XYF
