First weekend of august is a special weekend in Iceland. Its called the mercehants weekend. The Monday after the weekend is called merchants day and is supposed to be an extra day off for everyone working in retail and commerce. In practice everyone gets the day off. Its the biggest camping weekend in the summer since the Monday extends the weekend.
The Iceland amateur radio association has used the opportunity and made this a field-weekend on low HF bands. The idea is to use the opportunity to get active on the radio when all the radio amateurs are spread over the various camping sites of the country. Low band HF are usually the best bands for that since we don’t have repeater coverage and too great distance for VHF/UFF to work between the “corners of the country”. 80m with NVIS propagation reigns supreme for that!
But ofcourse we had a storm this weekend! And rain! Lots of rain!
I had planned to be active the whole weekend using my low band QMX. Because of weather that turned into just being active on Sunday evening and Monday morning.
I decided on Sunday evening to go down to the grass field by the bottom of the cove my town is named after, the seal pup cove or Kópavogur in TF-speak. I took the QMX and antenna to the site and set up.
I managed to get on the air on 80m, 60m and 40m SSB and make a few contacts! The QMX is quite a capable rig!
The Monday morning I headed back to the area at about 10:00 in the morning. This time I went on my bicycle! I decide to use the cargo box on the back of the bike as my operating station. This worked well in the nice weather!
I got contacts on 80m, 60m and 40m. The furthest distance was to the north part of Iceland, to TF4WD in Sauðárkrókur. I was happy with that for a QRP contact on SSB! I also got a good demonstration of the difference of propagation distance over ocean vs urban area. I had contact with TF8KY and TF3IRA. TF3IRA was 3-5km away but most of the area between us was urban area. TF3IRA could barely copy me on 40m. TF8KY was 50-60km away but copied me like standing next to him. The path to TF8KY was over ocean.
After managing a few contacts in the TF field event I decided to use the opportunity to see if I could do a little POTA activity. It so happens that the beach of he cove is an protected natural habitat area and has been entered into POTA as a park IS-0049. For the activation to be by the rules I had to move the antenna and myself to the beach even though its just a few meters.
I tuned out on 20m and called CQ POTA on CW. I managed to get 7 stations from the US in the log before the powerbank ran empty. Maybe just as good as it had started to rain and it was almost dark. Not a full activation but good fun!
I’m going to try again to activate this “park”. Perhaps I should try setting up a vertical to get the benefit of a low radiation angle and the effect of the ocean as a groundplane!
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