Mine was cold, very cold. Friday morning I posted to a mailing list in work that I was going to set up a station in the car-park, a few colleagues braved the elements and helped me set up a station (thanks lads).

I decided to do it the hard way and enlist help in putting an 80m dipole together, while I put the VHF/UHF antenna together and on the pole. When we got the pole up, my radio, the FT-857 was not happy with a very high reflected power level (SWR).

It turned out that the antenna was about 30 feet to short. So down it came. All was well on the second attempt and I was happy when John, EI9JO returned to my call. I worked several other stations nationally (on 80meters using Near Vertical Incidence Skywave Techniques) some through the South East Repeater Network (part of which is maintained by SEARG), and some stations in Europe using PSK on 30meters.

It was cold, but it was fun.