This summer we went for a long (three weeks) holiday to Denmark. Near the town of Ebeltoft and near the beach of Egsmark we rented a house. When we where packing for this holiday, the initial idea was to not bring all my HAM-gear with me. Propagation isn’t brilliant at the moment and the car was already almost fully packed. But at the last moment I couldn’t resist and packed the trusty Icom IC-7300 and the FYM-deltaloop anyway. After a hellish drive of twelve hours to Ebeltoft (815km) with lots of traffic jams, roadworks and lot’s and lot’s of rain we arrived in beautiful Denmark. The next day I spent some time setting up the deltaloop. Since there was a very spacious garden there was plenty of room. Actually the garden was so big, I put the deltaloop in one corner of it and you wouldn’t even noticed it.

Setting up the station

There was something of a ‘garden room’ in the house. Actually it was kind of outside, but these two sliding doors could close it off. Perfect to create a shack, because it wasn’t used for anything other than storing cushions. And the great part was the coax cable could run under the sliding doors without damage it. So the garden room got transformed to the radio room.

First run

With everything in place, I sat down for the IC-7300 to give the dial a swing. I already were afraid the propagation wouldn’t be any good and it wasn’t. Nothing much besides a little Europe. A few evenings I participated in the ‘Gooische 40m vakantieronde’ but even The Netherlands was hard to achieve. I did recorded a few of those QSO’s but those where the good evenings. In the end I’ve made three QSO’s: RX3Q, EJ0L and LZ1QI. Nice QSO’s but not worth the trouble…