Early morning Pedestrian Mobile

A recent early morning pedestrian mobile session on Sunday 21/July/2013, apart from providing a long list of DX contacts, provided the opportunity to work some QRP with KX7XX in San Francisco.

I'd been on air for at least four hours, my batteries were fried and I was delivering at most 50W on high power, thankfully the conditions were good and Luke didn't mind giving me some signal reports on varying power, I remembered to video the event:

Had I remembered to start the video rolling sooner I'd have been able to capture the moment my friend, and co pedestrian mobiler, Dave G4AKC was able to work Luke with 9mW, that's not a typo, 9mW SSB contact between Dave G4AKC and Luke KK7XX, that makes my 500mW contact look positively QRO.

A little later, and with my batteries almost dead, an estimated antenna input of 10 to 20W and we got a call from Philippe, FO4BM, I wasn't too strong with him, but perfect copy, had the group not been so big it would have been good to try mW again, maybe next time:

Always trying to squeeze a little more efficiency from my antennas and locations, I added a little more height to the screwdriver and cap hap combination, for this I used the four 1' shafts from my buddipole kit, this obviously adds 4' to the overall length of the antenna, with a total length of approximately 10', plus the addition of the cap hat, means the antenna will only tune as high as 18.2MHz, thus encompassing the whole of the 17m band, without the cap hat the antenna will cover all of the 15m band.

With this antenna and favourable band conditions I was able to work HH5/KC0W with first call and took my logged mobile DXCC to 210, I say logged because there are a few from last year that haven't yet been logged, including French Polynesia, as they are on my old mobile phone logging program which doesn't output ADIF and requires manually transferring, there are possibly four DXCC to be added, and when I can find the motivation I'll get round to it.