FT818ND - off to the coast!

With all repaired and back to normal now, I took the tiny FT818 to the coast at Llanbadrig church this afternoon for a short period of operating.

Mostly, this outing was to see how convenient (or not!) my latest rearrangement of the equipment might prove to be.  

I hadn't realised something quite funny about this operating position - a churchyard with lots of buried people around (including one grave stone with a Greek inscription): its grid square is IO73sk - 'silent key'!  That made me smile.

'Graveyard portable' at St. Patrick's 4th century church (IO73sk!)  Wylfa (decommissioned) nuclear power station centre background.

What didn't make me smile was the temperature!  I was supposed to be up the mountains today in glorious sunshine all day.  But the weather had other ideas.  A clear night with a fairly strong auroral glow at around 2am gave way to cloud and cold by dawn.  It must have been about 5 degrees Celsius or something; certainly not pleasant, and cold enough to make taking everything down at the end of the session quite difficult.

The FT818, back in action after its repair.  Man, it was cold!

 

Anyhow, all worked well with the coax magnetic loop tuned to 14MHz.  The bands were far too busy to make much impact with about 3 Watts out, but I did manage a few QSOs with FT4.  A couple of WSPR TXs at 1w were above or similar to any other G stations, so that's fine.

Generally, the FT818 is pulling me away from what can be rather dull digital work, also with the added equipment complexity, and towards SSB. With a bit of luck, it will soon be much warmer!