While on vacation with the family in a summer house rental in the town Akureyri in north Iceland I took the opportunity to activate IS-0103 Glerárdalur POTA park on the sunday 20th of july 2025.
Glerárdalur is a valley sculpted by a (long gone) glacier. It is named after the river Glerá that flows through it.
I parked my car at the parking spot where the hike to the mountain (Súlur) in north Iceland starts. A table with benches was conveniently located at the parking place.
This was my first use of my newly built QRP-Labs QMX 80m-20m tranceiver. I powered it with a PowerDelivery capable powerbank with a 12V trigger cable. The antenna was a Sota Beams Band-Hopper 3 inverted V antenna.
The weather was calm, slightly foggy but mostly dry. Temperatures were 13-15°C and no wind.
I operated mostly on 20m around 14.061MHz but managed one contact at the end of my activation on 30m. My activation started at 21:00UTC (Iceland is on UTC time so thats local time as well). I was able to get 12 total contacts making this a valid activation! Most of my contacts were early on in the activation, within the first 30 minutes. Things then got more quiet. I packed up after about 1h30minutes.
The QMX worked very well. It took me a little while to get used to it since it was my first use. The rig has a few “birdies”, that is spurious tones, that caught me by surprise. Some of them were very strong. I suspect they are perhaps generated by the powerbank boost converter. I’ll have to investigate that better.
I had contacts on both sides of the Atlantic. The European stations were generally stronger though, at least until the activity slowed down. Maybe it was a change in the radio conditions or maybe Europe just went to bed! 22:00UTC is midnight in big parts of Europe. My last contact was with F5MUX on 30m. His signal was the strongest signal of the evening.
Very enjoyable activation! My log has been uploaded to both LOTW and the POTA site.
tnx es 73 de TF3HR/P