The club setup at Blackie Spit in Crescent Beach again this year. We planned to work the event for 4 to 5 hours on the Saturday morning of the event. As last year we were over heated due to the day being one of the hotter ones of the summer, so this year we were hoping for a bit of cloud to cool the day down a bit. The morning looked promising as it was cooler from the night but the temperature soon started climbing again and before long it was getting quite hot. There was a nice breeze today so it made for a more pleasant day than last year.
Most of the regular members were out for the day and we had a lot of fun trying out many different radios and antennas. Though we didn't make a large number of contacts we did enjoy a few from some distance. Our first HF contact was to a station in Alaska who reported that we had a decent signal into his location.
For radios we used Ralph's IC-706 and Deme's TS-2000, the main HF antenna was the home made vertical Ralph constructed from his old Yagi. We also tried his buddy stick and then put up an 80 foot loop in the shape of a triangle. Jay brought his portable HF radio the Yaesu 817 with a number of small antennas. Stuart worked his 220Mhz radio and yagi, while Eric had his back country go kit comprising a Yaesu 8800 with dual band vertical and a 2m Yagi on a tall mast. We had quite a number of radios in operation on a number of bands giving something for everyone to do.
By 2PM we were starting to overheat a bit and decided to pack it in for this year. We all had a great deal of fun setting up at the beach and not only playing with radios but also enjoying the lovely setting.