SV8/G0TSM/P - Zante Is. 2006

SV8/G0TSM/P

From the 25th July 2006 until the 1st of August 2006 I operated as SV8/G0TSM/P from Alykanas, Zante (Zakynthos) Greece. This was my first time outside of the UK so for me this was a very interesting trip. My daughter wanted a holiday somewhere hot, I fancied playing on 6M and having a dabble in the IOTA contest and my spot on the IOW wasn't confirmed, so I booked a last minute holiday on EU-052. It was hard to find an island where I could have a sea path to the UK as SV5/9 seemed only to have vacancies on the south sides of the islands.

I stayed at the Whitehouse apartments which were only 200M from the Beach and 100M from the town. At the apartments there is a decent size pool and a bar which serves good food.

Here's inside the apartment, I'm sitting right under the air-con unit!, nice when the outside temp was 34C.

The rig is the new IC7000, homemade ATU for HF, P133 laptop running Logger32 for outside of the contest and SDi for the IOTA contest. The headset is homemade. On the left of the laptop is the little box where I plug the headphones in, on the top are two switches, they are for the voice keyer built into the IC7000, saves a lot of calling, this works exactly the same as the IC756-pro2 which I used last year from EU-120.

Here on the roof is my 6m antenna, a quad loop and an HF doublet (34ft legs + 300-Ohm feeder). Both antennas were tied to 9M GRP fishing poles and then tied to reinforcement bars using 'bungees'. The quad loop uses 1/4 wave of satellite coax as a matching section, the rest of the coax is mini RG213.

This was the view to the UK just after sunset. The first day I was on the air my 6M antenna was only 8M to the top of the quad loop, it's typical that this was also the day of the best opening. So if you worked me on 25/08/06 then your sig would have gone through this white building.

I found it interesting that most Gs weren't actually double hop Es, they seemed to be tropo+1 hop Es+tropo, you could tell by the constant low warbly sigs. When they were double hop Es the sigs were much louder and the sigs were fading up/down rapidly.

And here is to Central Europe, DL OE etc... Just beyond those trees/bushes is the beach.

And the QSL..

BAND/MODE TOTALS

BAND

SSB

CW

RTTY

TOTAL

40M

23

86

1

110

30M

0

48

0

48

20M

59

269

20

348

17M

0

7

0

7

15M

50

31

0

81

12M

0

0

0

0

10M

0

2

0

2

6M

53

144

0

197

Click here for a few more pics of the town and beach