It was a very bright, sunny day today, though icy cold when the sun went behind a cloud, up on the few high spots on Anglesey - Mynydd Parys. This is 139m above sea level, with a clear line of sight across the Irish Sea to Cumbria, the Isle of Man and the Mourne Mountains in Northern Ireland. It's a great place for radio, and where I lived for 13 years.
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| Beaming northern Cumbria... |
I had a bit of a stroll up there and took my 8-element AliExpress Yagi along with a GPS-enabled Meshcore transceiver. A convenient concrete block to stop people driving over the historic copper mine tailings heaps provided a useful level surface on which to rest the antenna.
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| Cumbria, seen early morning from Mynydd Parys, with background lighting revealing the landscape clearly. |
Aiming it by eye at northern Cumbria, I was quite surprised to make a direct, 'zero hop' connection with a repeater on Lank Rigg at 137.6km distance. Given this is UHF and the power output only around 0.15W - admittedly boosted by the Yagi's ~10dBi gain to an effective 1.5W, that's pretty good going! As you can see from the screengrab of the app, below, the direct 'ping' signal there was -13dB and -6.25dB back to me (the rest of the information on-screen is redundant for the ping test). I don't know what the antenna arrangements are in Cumbria.
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| Irish Sea area, showing me (north coast Anglesey, purple dot) and the MCC Lank Rigg repeater that heard me. |
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