It was so much fun to work you chaps!

This morning I was picked up by Rob PD2RSW at about 07:00 UTC. When I walked down to his car a neighbor saw my "fishing pole" and asked me "Are you going fishing?" and I replied "Yes, I'm going fishing for English". He looked at me like I was bonkers, which probably is true and makes life much more enjoyable HI HI.

We were on a mission to work the Invicta's!

When we arrived at our field location along the river Rhine just outside our town Wijk bij Duurstede we started to build up the rig. Lashed two 6m fishing poles together to get some height (about 10 m) and rolled out the half wave dipole. Hooked up the homebrew radio to the coax. Let Rob PD2RSW listen to 80m with the regen. He had never heard a regen before and he was impressed by the audio quality. He was listening to a SSB-net and commented "They all sound so natural".

Then I called CQ and didn't expect Colin to come right back for me, but there he was!

I could hear Colin  G3VTT at first with a 579 signal, but it quickly dropped to 339 with QSB and a strong DL was pounding CQ next to our frequency, which wasn't very helpful. Anyway, the TT paraset came through and the QSO was made.

After I signed off with Colin I heard G3LCK calling Colin, but LCK was also very weak over here.

Rain clouds were forming and we heard a lot of thunder crashes coming from the receiver so we decided it was time to break down quickly.

Nice to hear you had nice weather and a splash around.

Two pictures of my TT paraset in the field. As you can see, I've build it into a diecast box. No labels yet. Key is J-37 and phones are modified R-30U both surplus. Power supplied by a 12V/16Ah gell-cell.