03/02/2004 | C6ASB For those of you that worked C6ASB, heres why the CW was sometimes a little bit rough and the response to calls often slower than normal. The station ergonomics were not the best, but the station environment could hardly be beat! Travel delayed my operation until Sunday afternoon, but I still decided to get on for a few hours anyway. Coming from Iowa in February, it was also a high priority to get some sun and warm air! So, I set up for a couple of hours on the beach. The station consisted of a Yaesu FT-817 running on the internal battery, a K1EL K10SMT memory keyer built into an Altoids tin, a set of Palm Paddles (that often would hang up due to sand in the contacts), and logging using GOLog on a Palm PDA. Since the beach chair was aluminum, the magnetic base on the paddles was of little use. The antenna was a modification of the W3FF Buddipole design, using a single center-loaded vertical element with 8 ground radials, installed right at the edge of the surf. Initially I started at the 5W power level, then dropped to 2.5W as the battery started going down, then finally to 0.5W for about the last 40 or so QSOs. If the pileup noticed any difference, I couldnt tell it! My battery finally completely died with quite a few stations still calling; sorry I was not able to work you all. It was a real challenge to juggle between the Palm for initially copying the calls, the paddles to initiate the exchange, the keyer to finish the qso, and then the Palm again to log the qso. Next time there will have to be a CW interface to the Palm The view is looking NW toward the US.
For more information, visit my website at: http://pages.cfu.net/~sjs/c6asb.htm -- AK0M