Radio WeekendA few weeks ago Karel, PE2KDK send an e-mail to a few friends with the idea to spend a weekend in a rental house somewhere remote in the woods. All these guys are HAM’s so you can imagine this will be a full blown Radio Weekend! Attending: Karel PE2KDK, Marco PH4M, Henk PE1PEX and me, Jim PA1JIM.
Meanwhile Karel has booked the house for the weekend of 2nd and 3th of April. I immediately checked the contest-calendar to see if there are any contest that weekend but there are not. Rumor is that Henk has a backorder on one of the first Icom IC-7300’s that will come out in The Netherlands. 2016 for me is all about the new Icom IC-7300, so I am looking forward a little extra for this weekend! Maybe I can play with the new rig then for the first time. If the rumor is true and Henk will take the new rig to this weekend, maybe we have to make a schedule when we are allowed to operate it 😉

Can you imagine, a whole weekend just about radio’s, a very low noise level and almost unlimited possibilities to build antenna’s?

The next thing to do is to figure out what kind of antenna’s we want to build that weekend. I do have some green glass-fiber sticks which can be used to build little antenna masts. Each piece is 1,2 meters (almost 4 feet) and you can put them together very easily. Maybe I will take a ZS6BKW with me to cover all 80 to 10 meter bands. I don’t know yet how much space we can use for antenna setup but if it is enough, we could build a beverage receiving antenna for 160 meters. And of course the 40-meter-PA3FYM-antenna (details follow) should be there all weekend!

A radio weekend full of coax cables, antenna’s, rigs and weak radio signals, I am looking forward to it!

Hello everyone! It was a while since I post something here. Thats because we enjoyed a little holiday in the south of France. Not the Alpes this time but we went to the Dordogne. Very nice trip! We rented a big house with swimming pool (although it was way to cold to swim in it) and a nice garden in a place called La Lardin-Saint-Lazare (JN

When we arrived I immediately setup the ‘travelkit’ containing a fishing rod, about 6 meters high, a few wires for a 20m inverted V dipole, some coax cable and ofcourse my good old Kenwood TS-50 and AT-50. Very nice singals from all over Europe! Noise level below S0 what is so rare these days. Even made qso with Cuba and Florida!