I managed to grab a couple of hours yesterday afternoon for a drive to Mt Dandenong VC-025 and then a simple activation. My first summit activation. (Thanks wifey)

I met Andy VK1NAM who had just packed up and was about to head home, Andy has been in Melbourne for the last week and has activated many mountains, have a look at his blog for more details. I ended up setting up where he had been positioned.

Nothing special about my first go. I set the squid pole against a wooden support beside a small tree and used my double sided velcro to secure this, I ran my ~10m of wire attached to the top and down the pole then across to my travel case, and ran out the ~10m ground wire, I used 8xaa NiMH batteries in the battery tray to power the radio and connected it up and a quick tune had me on 7MHz. The ZM-2 tuned this up nicely (as it should), I spotted myself on SotaGoat and put out a call.

I spent an hour playing with the setup, adjusting the wire/ground and playing wit the tuning to see what works best.

In the end i made 11 contacts, all on 7.090 MHz, though it appears I mucked up the first callsign, so, thats 10 successful stations worked. Thanks to all who put up with my low power, comments from the day suggested a lot of QSB.

I also had a tune around 14MHz but didn’t manage to work anyone, and had a call on the ham clubs local 40m chat frequency, again with no luck.

Things for next time, a small ground mat/tarp to stop my bum getting damp from the grass, and I need to organise a proper external battery to provide a more consistent voltage to the radio, hopefully this should add that little extra to help the poorer contacts. Ive been watching HobbyKing website and waiting for the Australian warehouse to stock the LiFePo4 8.4aH battery, its in the international warehouse, maybe I should just buy it form there?

Thanks for those who I worked.

And a Cheesey Video