Did a little bit of work on the antenna and have come to the conclusion that I need to isolate the antenna from the mast to make it work properly. The way it stands right now, the entire garden shed frame is the counterpoise and that means I cannot tune each band by the radials as i should. I also need to add in a 1:1 balun to isolate the feedline also so its not part of the antenna as well.
But anyway, that aside, I got on the CW today and thought i would hit up the RBN to see what is happening. I was calling on 10m initially and my computer crashed, while i was dicking about with it someone came back to my call, pretty sure it was a VK3 but i was not really paying attention and missed the opportunity.
So off to do a tour of the bands, 15m was next and not much doing there and then 20m. So while calling on 20m I kind of got sidetracked with something else and just left the auto caller running and after about 15mins I actually made a contact with ZL1BWG. He was kind of weak to me, but got his call after a couple of tries and made the contact.
So its good to finally have the monkey off the back and to have made 1 CW contact in 6 weeks of trying. I have worked quite a few parks stations on CW, but this was the first one of me calling CQ. So thats a good thing. Now, i need to spend some time tomorrow working on this antenna and getting things just right and everything should be ticketyboo. Ticketyboo I tell you 😉
