I will be doing a new portable operation from 7th August until 11th August.
As usual I will be located at OK30to.
Working conditions will be the Buddihex from Buddipole as well as the FTDX 10 and the SPE Expert 1.3K-FA.
I hope to be able to work N5J but also work a lot of DX from this location which is much quieter than from home downtown HCMC.
See you then
This week end I turned on the radio a little bit for the IOTA Contest 2024.
This was the first contest with my new radio Flex 6600 and I can say that a contest with this radio is a whole lot different than using my Yaesu FTDX 10 but I will do a separate blog post about the Flex 6600.
Propagation was not really good especially on Sunday. As usual, doing a contest with an Inverted V dipole and from South East Asia is very challenging. I entered the contest in the High power mixed (CW & SSB) category.
Only 70 contacts were made and very few European stations came through to Vietnam.
10M was really dead on my side.
As you may know I face a lot of QRM from home with usually around S8 of noise on all bands. This is why I try to do portable at the beach as often as I can.
The location is around 2h30 drive from my home QTH. The benefits of this location is that there is absolutely no noise when beamed towards the sea from around 80 degres to 200 degres.
The noise goes up to S5/7 while beaming towards Europe.
My working conditions when I am portable are:
From this location I am able to discover real radio again, it is crazy to see how bands seems to be opened while at home it feels like they are always closed just because of noise. Without all this noise I can see that there is a lot of DX to work and it feels really like being in a different area. Pile ups seems bigger also due to the fact that I hear more stations with the low noise.
I will be portable again on 17th until 19th November.