With lighthouse weekend behind us for another year I can confidently say the weekend was a great success. Once again the Chase Alive team helped us gain access to the Barrenjoey Lighthouse and it’s keepers cottage. This was a huge bonus as it allowed us to comfortably run multiple stations  from the elements, which this year included some very serious wind.

The MWRS team clambered up the hill early Saturday morning to setup a 40 Meter Dipole, A separate 3 beam TH-3 Yagi and a multiband whip. By 10 AM we were on the air and making our first contacts. One of the more unique ones would have to be the Maritime Mobile stations of PE1OAD who was on a container ship heading from Melbourne to Newcastle and VK2BTT which was the call sign being used by a team operating from the MV Cape Don.

One of the biggest advantages of the cottage being available is we are now able to operate later into the evening, a task which we had several members take on board.

For those curious we had multple radios in operation. Including a Codan 8528, Icom IC7000, Elekraft KX3, Yaesu FT-957D, Yaesu FT-7800 and more handhelds than you can poke a stick at.

Weekend statistics

Matt VK2ACL has gone to the trouble to digitise our logs for us. You can access the raw file HERE.

In short over the weekend we saw

  • 203 QSO in total (177 unique callsigns, 12 unique country prefixes)
  • 61 lighthouse QSOs (41 unique lighthouses: VK=38, ZL=2, US=1)
  • 6 CW QSO:
    • One was to USA
    • One was from our KX3 to another KX3 in VK5 making its very first QSO on the air!
    • One was a SOTA activation on top of Mt Gorrin in VK3
    • The other three QSO were in VK2&VK3
  • 1 D-STAR QSO to a lighthouse in USA
Here is a quick video taken on the Saturday showing the setup, the conditions and some of the QSO’s.
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcsls7KyLY8[/tube]

A great view of the action by Thomas VK2VTJ.

 

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