Playing radio when out with the family never really works out, so I decided to deploy my mobile stick for 14MHz and just let WSPRlite send some signals to the world whilst I built rock castles with my daughter.
The location is not exactly outstanding, with only a limited open sea view, and with plenty of tourist vehicles in the car park.
I found some difficulty matching the antenna properly. It struck me this was likely due to common mode current on the coax feed. After winding a simple multi-turn 'air' balun, the problem went away, the matching was nice and sharp, and reached a low ~1.2:1 SWR.
I ran for about 1.5 hours, and was surprised to find my £20 mobile stick did substantially better than G3CWI and G8LIK, who are both pretty good stations with full-sized wire antennas. Shorter DX stations were stronger to those two stations, but that is of no interest to me, because my stick was getting to places, under very tough geomagnetic conditions (Kp=4), that they weren't.
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