17m Surprise! (Updated)

A nice, warm summer's evening last night.  Another visit to the copper mine with my grab-and-go portable kit, this time for 17m, was justified, especially as the 'mini-bog' site had been soaked overnight with heavy rain.

All it takes to be effective.  You won't geneally see these advertised, of course, because nobody can make money out of them (but a few try!)

 

I had a few nice QSOs with FT8 and SSB on 3W and 5W, respectively.

Quite amazing to see how effective QRP can be from a good site: reports of FT8 activity, mostly RX of my 3W:

I also ran just two rounds of WSPR (at 1W), which returned a surprising number of spots, given that 17m often has very few WSPR users these days.  Conditions seem to have enticed people out of their slumber:

So, if you continuously read material online or in magazines that you need a £1500 rig, a tower, Yagi and a £2000 amplifier to be a success in amateur radio - you really don't!  A QRP rig and some junk wire, carefully made into a resonant vertical and deployed on a good site, is all it takes.

UPDATE.

The following evening, I undertook some evaluation of the 'mini-bog' site compared to my 17m vertical delta loop, just a few hundred metres away.  First, the map of TX from the mini-bog:

Spots of my 1W WSPR at 18MHz from the copper mountain hill 'mini-bog'.

And, second, the spots from the vertical delta at home:

Now, whilst the two maps do not look very different, there are in fact very important differences.  First of all, just by looking, you can see that the vertical loop is not getting as far west into the US as the 'mini-bog' site.  It also has more spots from Europe, which it to be expected due to screening by higher ground immediately to the east of the copper mine site.

Good stations like K5XL and KFS simply couldn't hear the delta, whilst the 'mini-bog' site was managing it quite comfortably (median at KFS for 1/4 wave vertical was -18dB)  That implies a difference of at least 16dB between the two sites, given the detection limit is -34dB.  As we'll see in a moment, this kind of enhancement is backed up by spots actually heard, not simply not heard.

VE6JY heard the copper mine site at -8dB.  But from the delta at home, it was only -23dB; a 15dB difference.  Always good to put that into context, because it magically turns 1W into nearly 32W.  Very useful, when you are QRP!

The only close match was from KA7OEI-1, which only returned a 3dB enhancement for the copper mine site, compared to the delta back home.

Overall, of nine of the best DX heard, no less than five did not hear my delta at all in the brief test period (17:54-18:18UT)

And, finally, some SSB heard from far-away Arizona at what is, for the conditions and general achievement of most stations at the time, quite amazing signal strength, albeit with occasional, strong QSB (suggestive of very low angles, I would expect):