I had an interesting discussion with Frank, M0AEU about the Gilwell Park radio station this week and have been playing around trying to design a station that will be useful for the Scouts and possibly double up as a contest site in the Scout close season. The rules for the station are simple – no wires in places where the scouts can get at them!

That doesn’t preclude temporary antennas for contests. I have done a screen grab of the site from Google earth and marked up some preliminary ideas.

The site has changed a bit from when this image was taken and the building outlined in blue has been removed and replaced with another one that is a different shape. The radio shack will be in the new building at the spot marked with the arrow. My initial thoughts are to have the following permanent antennas:
  
There is a commercial tower on site, about 90ft tall marked T1. My current plan is to have an HF triband yagi, plus 6m yagi on this tower. This tower would also have a side arm with halyard supporting inverted V dipoles (160, 80 and 40m, marked in purple ends >20ft above the ground). These are oriented east-west at the moment, but I am unsure of the effect of the metal roof blow them. The side arm could also hold a V/UHF vertical.

The second tower, T2, is a 40ft crank up mast with a decent sized stub mast on top. This will be the VHF mast supporting yagis for 2m and 70cm. I also have a butternut HF2V vertical antenna for 160/80/40 that could be hidden in the trees at “Bnut” to provide some low angle radiation on those bands.

This should be a fairly straightforward install as I have most of the kit to do this already.
  
The remaining markings are for temporary antennas that would be set up for contest use. The two green circles (rough scale to include radials) could be full size verticals for 40 and 80m. The yellow dashed lines are along thick hedgerows and could be used for reversible beverage antennas. The 800ft length would be to central America/Japan which makes sense, but I am not sure whether it is worth the effort to install a 400ft one running N/S. Is it worth having an Africa beverage? As you can see form the picture there doesn’t seem to be an easy option to install a North America beverage unless it runs across open land. 

So, play fantasy radio station with me. What would you do on this site and why?

Back at home  I have been using my remote rig set up with my Ft-847 for VHF+ work. Whilst is has done everything I expected of it, not having a real tuning knob at the operator end is a major drawback – it just isn’t any fun tuning with a computer interface.

Whilst thinking about solutions I saw a reasonably priced Icom IC-706G for sale. I appreciate the radio doesn’t have cutting edge performance, but it is not much worse than the FT-847 . As a result I took the plunge and I have spent some time setting it up with my RRC v1 boxes.
 
The picture below shows my two RRC boxes in the loft “shack” attached to my TS-480 for HF (right) and IC-706G (left). There have been some RF feedback problems, so I have had to attach large amounts of ferrite to sort this out! The box at the back is a Cross Country Wireless duplexer to split the VHF/UHF port to the respective amplifiers

The photo below shows the operator end, on the kitchen table. It was all working very nicely too. Note the child lock on the cupboard behind the table. My son is now 14 months old and rummaging through everything he can find. He is the reason that my  office/shack was turned into a nursery and the RRC adventure started!

I spent a couple of days last week at the Open University in Milton Keynes working. I am a part time member of the G0OUR radio club there and managed to sneak into the shack to play with the club’s new Elecraft K3.
 
First impressions for the radio were good, but I find it difficult to be objective as the radio is attached to a linear and a fantastic Optibeam 16-3 for 10/15/20 a bi-square for 40m or high (100ft) dipoles on 80 and 160. This puts all of my experience with bits of wire at home into the bin as this is a different league!
 
Better still was that I managed to work an all time new one Brunei (V85RY) on 20m SSB. I made it through the pile up second call – unheard of from home.
 
A couple of pics below shows the yagi (and smoking security guard) on a cloudy day with the towers for the 40/80/160 antennas in the background.