Day 2 begins and it's raining relentlessly

It's day two of our activation of Tory Island (EU-121) and it's raining relentlessly. We still have two more antennas to set up. Activity has been good (at times) so far on 30m CW and 40m CW/SSB. We have about 370 QSOs so far from two stations. The 6m station is being set up as we speak. Thankfully, the antenna was set up last night.

Declan, Liam and Bernie setting up the off-centre-fed dipole yesterday evening.

Spirits are high among the EJ7NET group. Dermot EI5IQ pitched his tent and slept out there overnight. The rest of us opted for the comfortable beds here at Teach Sabba.

As we are approaching midsummer, there is no complete darkness at night. A beautiful sunset was followed by a fantasic red sky last night, so needless to say I spent quite a bit of time out with the camera. I even managed to get a photo of the shack late last night.

Our QTH at Tory is called Teach Sabba.

Video: Using the Reverse Beacon Network to compare your antennas, and to discern band propagation

This is a short video I made today demonstrating how to use the Reverse Beacon Network to compare your signal on different antennas. The RBN is a very handy tool for the CW enthusiast and for hams interested in testing their antennas and also finding out about propagation on various bands. In this video, I use both an inverted v dipole and a Butternut vertical to transmit a CQ call on 10 Mhz (30 metre band). I then compare the signal reports spotted automatically by skimmer stations. However, on the second CQ call with the vertical antenna, I get an unexpected DX call . . . I will let you watch the video!

Emergency disentanglement required after storm!

Jim EI2HJB uses binoculars to see how
badly entangled the rope was.

You might not be able to see properly in this image, but the storm of St. Stephen's Day which lasted through the night into December 27th caused a strange situation to emerge with my antenna system. A rope from the hexbeam became dislodged from its position and somehow managed to get entangled with one of the legs of my inverted v dipole system. When I woke yesterday morning the first thing I did was to check the antennas because the storm was really ferocious. A large number of trees were blown down in my region, in Louth and Meath. In Ireland over 50,000 homes were without power for a time after electricity lines were blown down. We have had a number of storms this winter, but this latest one certainly was the worst.

Anyway, I called my friends into action and they duly obliged by making themselves available at 10am this morning (Saturday, 28th), to help retrieve the situation. Thankfully, none of the antennas was actually broken, but I was unable to turn the hexbeam without causing something to break, and I was anxious to get it sorted out.

Jim EI2HJB, Fintan EI7CEB and Pat EI2HX all arrived to help. It was a delicate operation. While we could lower the inverted v system, which is on a rope and pulley, the problem was that the rope from the hexbeam was very much tangled up in the 80m inverted v and wouldn't let us lower it down. Using binoculars, we could see that the entanglement was severe. The rope somehow got knotted up quite well by the wind!

The eventual solution was to lower the hexbeam slightly and to rotate it so that Fintan EI7CEB could get into a position on a ladder to reach the knotted rope. This sounds simple, but it involved taking the stay wires off the hexbeam's supporting pole, and also loosening the pole from its brackers. After about an hour or so, we finally had the knot opened and I had to get up onto the shack roof to reattach the rope to its correct spreader on the hexbeam. Then we had to right the pole again and re-attach all the stays, plus the 80m inverted v had to be reattached to its support. All in all, a tough job but we got there in the end!