Storm Desmond takes his toll on my hexbeam

The latest winter storm to pass over Ireland, called Storm Desmond, brought extremely strong winds and heavy rain to the country. Unfortunately, my hexbeam did not make it through this one. It has survived many storms, but Desmond was too strong.

Three band wires snapped during the storm.

As you can see in the above photo, I've lost three out of five bands due to the storm. Three separate band wires snapped during the high winds. The hexbeam has a great ability to flex in strong winds, and even with the wires placed in such a way as to allow for this flexing, sometimes the strain on the antenna is just too severe.

At the moment, I am able to use 20m and 17m, but there is a higher SWR on 15m, 12m and 10m.

I'm not sure what I will do to repair the antenna. I feel that maybe stronger wire is part of the solution. I'm just glad that there are no ATNOs (All-Time New Ones) coming up this month because I don't know when I will get a chance to repair it.

Rain, wind and mixed propagation. Oh, and antenna damage!

It's Monday morning and overnight we've had some very strong wind. As a result, there was some slight damage to the antenna system. The Sota pole holding up our 20/15m wire vertical broke in the wind and needed to be repaired, while the 30m wire vertical came loose from its pole. However, a short time later we were up and running again.

Sunday night was good on the bands, with decent action on 40, 30 and 20. Most of the activity has been on CW, but Liam EI7DSB is quite active on SSB, especially on 20 metres. We passed the 2,000 QSO mark last night. There was some action too on 6 metres. We made 11 QSOs, some with EI stations and there were some Europeans who made it into the log, including several from Croatia and Italy, and one each from Poland and Slovenia. We will keep a listening watch on 50 Mhz during our stay using a dedicated FT897 and a two-element beam.

Band conditions this morning are not that good. After a promising start with a good rate on 20 cw, the action died off. 30m has been OK, and 40m has been very hit and miss.

I've received information from Peter EI7CC that Gola Island was in fact activated before, by Paddy EJ7GK, in 1997. So we're not the first!!! Thanks for the information Peter. At least we know now!

The food has been excellent, thanks to our chef, Tony EI3HA, who has been looking after us very well. We will surely put on a few pounds while we're here, sitting around working radio and eating all the time!

I took a walk to the western end of the island with Declan EI6FR yesterday. There are fantastic views from the top of the cliffs out into the Atlantic Ocean.

A splint is added to support the broken Sota pole.

Roast beef for Sunday dinner. Yum.

A card EJ7GK to EI7CC from his Gola activation in 1997.

Anthony EI2KC at the edge of the cliffs on Gola.

Houston, we've had a problem . . . in fact, two problems

They say a picture speaks a thousand words, so here goes . . .

This is my VHF array, sadly damaged by all the recent windstorms. The antennas themselves seem to be fine, but as you can see the stub pole is broke, and I'm pretty sure the rotator is shattered too (it certainly isn't working!) So at the earliest opportunity I will need to get my rescue team up to the QTH for some help to repair the damage. I lowered the array this morning to try to prevent further wind damage. To add insult to injury, two of the wires on my hexbeam are snapped, the 12m wire and the 15m wire. Picture below:

You can see the 15m wire dangling down from the hexbeam here.

The wind storms started on St. Stephen's Day and there's been at least one bad wind storm every week since then. My antennas have taken a heck of a battering. Let's hope the rescue team and I can restore them without too much trouble or expense. Here's hoping . . .

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!

The HF bands are pretty dead this morning

HF propagation is non existent this morning. There is a moderate geomagnetic storm underway, with the K index at 5 (peak 6) which may be affecting things. I did hear one ZL station on 20m SSB this morning but pretty much nothing else. I made one contact with Gary EW1MM but he vanished in QSB. Above is a short video showing just how poor the band is. It's not that there's even any local stuff to be worked - it's just dead as a dodo! Ironically, the sunspot number is at 158, so hopefully when the aurora subsides we will have good propagation . . .