Today’s largely bright and sunny day in the South of the country meant that it was a good day to get out and play radio. Pete M0PSX and Steve 2E0UEH met up to put on two HF stations at Shoeburyness East Beach.
Steve’s worked at this location before, and reported good take-off, making it a great place to try some radio operation.
The two stations were very different in their configuration. Steve 2E0UEH was operating from his home-built Wouxun X1M Pro HF rig – Maximum power for this tiny rig is 5 watts, but Steve’s impressive 10m fishing pole plus the good radio takeoff meant that working Europe was not a problem QRP. See Steve’s review of the Wouxun X1M Pro Transceiver, and his experiences of constructing the kit.
Steve, a keen constructor, has also made his own CW paddle and had brought it out for a field trial today. The paddle is truly tiny, but produced great results on 40m and 20m
In contrast, Pete M0PSX was working at a much higher power – upwards of 50 watts in his FT-857, but only with an inefficient 5m fishing pole antenna, and SSB voice only.
Bands were full for the European HF contest, so it was a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them”, and doing some contesting. Pete worked the European HF Contest for a couple of hours on 20m and 15m, helping to give away points to those taking the contest more seriously. The required exchange was the apparently obligatory “59” signal report plus the last two digits of the year in which you were licensed. Nice to work some short contesting calls in Europe and rack up some contacts with stations in Latvia, Romania, Solvenia, Belarus, Finlanld, Russia, Estonia, Italy and Lithuania.
As for refreshments – Steve and his better half Sarah had brought along a serious piece of beverage technology – a mains-powered pod coffee machine, run from Steve’s new mains inverter(see the picture above). The test of their /P Pod machine was not an entire success, but Pete’s flask was on-hand as a backup for coffee and tea. The local ice-cream emporium, with it’s fake Magnum-like ice-cream helped.
The team had a kite active for some of today’s activation too!
Conditions for kite-flying at Shoebury East beach are great, and so Sarah M6PSK launched a kite attached to 10 metres… of nylon string. Nothing to do with radio – but it got your attention, and it really was perfect weather for kite aeronautics!
Hopefully you’ve been out playing radio recently too – that’s what it’s all about… getting out and playing radio, and demonstrating the hobby to curious passers-by when the opportunity arises, as it did today.
If you’ve been out playing radio at the weekend in Essex, get in touch and send us your pictures, so we can share with the rest of Essex.
