Action on the Beach

For some time now, a few members of the club have been wondering how our portable vertical antennas would perform at the beach. So today we had arranged with the city to gain access to the area by the boat ramp at the far end of the west beach to deploy some antennas. We set up Brett’s Buddipole in a vertical configuration as well as Don’s Crank-IR.

We had both antennas ready and swapped between Ralph’s old reliable IC-706 and Konstatin’s new Yaesu FT-991.  Eric did some calling and was able to finally fit between a mass of callers in a pile-up to reach a station in Maryland. Other members made a few more contacts.

We tested both antennas and a couple of positions for the Crank-IR. Both were hearing signals at about the same strength with perhaps a slightly higher level for the Crank-IR. So now we need to decide if we want to run our field-day exercise down here.