Jeff VK2MZZ raised the idea of MWRS heading to Berrima Scout camp to enter the Trans Tasman contest of 2022. A bunch of us signed on for a full weekend – many of us have done it before & the challenges are there (but small) & the reward is high.
The w/e starts with pub night on Friday night for all those who can get there. The group overnight in the meagre scout accom bunks & stoke the fireplace given it does get quite cool here. Jeff also stoked up his new portable diesel heater!
Saturday morning begins the plan & launch & testing of the antennas: this year a full size 160m dipole & an 80/40 OCF. These are fed with copious amounts of RG58. Note perfect but a great compromise on these low bands where the loss is still quite low. The 160m had the centre balun hung from the highest tree up the hill & so that required a joiner & an extra run of coax. The 80/40 was much nearer the club & a single run of RG58 sufficed. For both antennas the SWR was quite good & then some on-air testing followed. 160 & 40m were perfect however on 80m there was a copious amount of noise, S5-6!! This made it unusable. An earth stake was produced by our resident electrician which reduced it to S5.
Dom VK2JNA & Geoff VK2AVR did some snooping – we took Dom’s car with HF & drove the town. We found that the whole town of Berrima has a filthy RF noise emanating from all the mains electrical wiring on 80m across the band – it’s everywhere! It doesn’t radiate too far but anything within 10m of a live electrical mains gets swamped by this all-encompassing hash on 80m. To try & eliminate the interference Dom & Geoff moved a leg of the OCF only for Greg VK2XE to find that this shorted/disconnected the antenna. A lot of mucking around ensued, multimeter testing coax, testing legs of OCF, never to find the actual problem but we did get the antenna performing again – this needs to be followed up at the club sometime to find if there is an intermittent joint somewhere.
In-between all this there were lots of chats, cups of tea on Phil APL’s new Trangia cooking system, cups of coffee (& chemical coffee), chips etc.
- in Attendance at Berrima:
- Greg XE & Declan (& Kira-woof)
- Andrew VK2EAH
- Michael VK2MDP
- Geoff VK2AVR
- Jeff VK2MZZ
- Phil VK2APL
- Dom VK2JNA
- Nick VK2FS
- Zara VK2ZYP
[…] many club members were burning up the 160m band, some 36km to the west sou’west, Richard VK2SKY and Simon Brown VK2TW donned our WICEN […]