Antennas Hold Up Through Storm Conditions

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WX Warning of severe storms!


The UK continues to get battered with gale force winds, snow and lots of heavy rain storms. Here in Baildon, West Yorkshire my Ham radio antennas are holding up well  despite the bad WX conditions. Earlier I had to recover my daughters play house which had been dismantled and blown away, fortunately it will be ok and should easily be reassembled. Our dustbins have also wandered off somewhere down the garden spitting rubbish out along the way, which will be not so fun to collect in the morning.
All things said and done I can't complain too much as I am well used to bad weather due to living at altitude up on the windy Yorkshire Pennine mountains.
Hopefully the storms will ease up in the early hours of tomorrow as predicted and the antennas will remain undamaged.

Recent Radioactivity

 I have been enjoying some good openings on 20m whilst mobile especially in the mornings and during the past three weeks I have made qso's into the US, Tasmania, Australia, Lebanon, Algeria and lots of Europe. My FT-857 & Maldol antenna is performing well for me as a mobile station and I have had some great radio reports.

I have also been pleasantly surprised with the recent homebrew 20m delta loop that I installed and my dining room operation on my old FT-890. I have worked a number of stations using this second setup here at my qth with great results both DX and short skip. The delta loop tunes up well with an old Nevada TM1000 tuner, I have been able to make qso's on other bands that I would not of expected too, again with good results. I have been using a paper log to record my progress with the dining room setup which I may share more details in a later post. Surprisingly,  I can tune the vertically polarised delta loop on 40m, 17m, 15m 12m & 10m as well as its resonant band 20m. I have been enjoying using it so much I must confess to neglecting my main shack set up and antennas.  I am sure that I will soon get back to my FT-1000/847 and comfy armchair just as soon as the novelty of the loop and FT-890 wear off h.i.

 Hope to hear some of you somewhere on the bands soon providing my antennas hold up, next week I am on holiday from work and should be active on HF and the Satellite bands. 73!

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