I got my first 44, but not before it all seemed lost.

I headed back up to Wambool Nature Reserve today to finish off my activation I started earlier in the week. On my first outing here I managed 17 QSOs, which qualified me for VKFF but I wanted to head back to finish off the WWFF. I planned to camp out over the UTC rollover again to take advantage of chasers either side, so armed with my newly modded 818 my EFHW and my squid pole I headed back out em this morning with an aim to be on air by 23:15 UTC.

Upon arrival I found that the little duck on the post was gone this time, again I left the stick undisturbed.

After hiking up to the trig point again I setup the antenna, sat down, self spotted and started calling, but, something didn’t seem right.

The “MOD” meter on the radio was going start to full scale, even with no audio in the mic? That’s not right! This is SSB. I shouldn’t have modulation unless I’m talking. Oh. Remember those mods I was talking about? Yesterday I fitted a speech compressor to the mic. It tested OK but apparently in the close proximity to the antenna there was enough RF getting in to cause it to go into full scale RF Feedback. No dice.

What to do? I hadn’t brought any screwdrivers with me, the processor is inside the mic, I tried lowering the power levels on the radio and lowering the mic gain to no avail. About to give up I had a look through my keys and found one that might work as a screwdriver. I tried it and with some messing around I managed to get the mic open and with a bit of yanking at the leads on the processor I managed to disconnect the processor and twist the wires back together to get the audio working again.

Finally re-spotting around 21:45 UTC and calling CQ I managed a few contacts before the UTC rollover, and after, and then more or less nothing. There was some other activity close by so I sat on 7.139 most of the time and that may have hampered my efforts, but I got stuck at the 9 contacts to go mark.

How to get those last 9? I had to get creative.

There was a net going on 7.100 so I checked in and told everyone where I was and what I was doing, and waited, and waited, and waited for the net to finish. While I was waiting I saw a spot come up for a ZL and managed another ParkToPark with a ZL station on 20, can’t complain about that! Back to 40, the net wound up and I called CQ and got a few more in, 5 more to go and another activator came up on 7.144 – bingo another ParkToPark, that’s 3 in one trip, I’ll take that! 4 more to go.

I jumped down to 7.134 due to again more activity elsewhere and called, and got 3 more, only one to go and …. Silence.

After a couple of minutes of calling an old friend from my foxhunting days, though I’m not sure he remembers me, came back, VK3ZPF Peter finished off a 3 hour long trip in the bush that seemed lost just as it began.

So that’s it, VKFF-2015 – Wambool Nature Reserve VKFF and WWFF activations complete. Now, which park to do next. We’ll see.

Since I got home I’ve reinstalled the compressor and shielded the heck out of mic and the compressor unit, is it enough? We’ll find out soon. It works from the shack, but it did last night too.

73 – Josh – VK2MES