New stick (yes, another one!)

An exceptionally rainy 72 hours brought quite serious flooding to North Wales yesterday.  Although I've seen significantly worse floods, I also saw severe floods in places I've never seen flood before.  Some of this is due to 'improved' agricultural land drainage, which keeps fields drier, but rivers much fuller.  

Mobile post office van didn't make it!  Never seen flooding of this scale here before.

During the rain, the postman delivered a 40m Ampro antenna here. The idea with this is so that I can spend some of the long winter nights at the coast playing radio.

Incidentally, beware imitations of the Ampro sticks.  I recently bought a 15m stick that turned out not to be an Ampro, which works perfectly well, but has fragile shrinking plastic covering, which has cracked at several places where the wire runs underneath; it looks like a pattern that would form if the plastic melted under too much power, but it's just broken. 

RX reports for my ~15W from the 40m stick.  Terminator is about 30 minutes after these reports.

Inevitably, a 40m band antenna that's roughly 2 and a half metres long is a bit of a compromise.  That said, even in wet weather, which always adversely affects magmounted antennas a little, I managed to quickly match it down to around 1.5:1 at the side of the road as I waited for my son to finish work.  I expect in dry weather and over a beach, it will come down to around 1.2:1.

WSPR RX (red) and TX (1W, green) over 64 minutes, including whilst moving /P

 

Not many G stations were getting across to KD2OM at the time on WSPR, so I was happy to be one of them.  Being in Scotland seems to give an advantage on 7MHz!

On the usual 15W or so, I managed plenty of QSOs on FT8, and did a small amount of WSPR.  I'm perfectly happy with what the antenna is doing, and I look forward to starry (OK, mostly cloudy, wet and windy) skies with my radio this winter!

The evening ended with encountering a car crash.  The police officer who told us the road was closed ahead must have wondered what the big antenna on the car was for, but didn't say anything!