With good weather and wanting to get out to test out the ‘unknown dipole’ I headed out to Bolderwood park in the New Forest. I setup the dipole, first I tried with the mast, but the ground in / around the New Forest is very rocky, so improvised and put the antenna in the trees !

This took longer than setting up the Alexloop Hampack mag-loop antenna, but I was keen to see what improvements using a dipole in the forest would bring compared to the Alexloop. I was soon setup on my ‘regular’ bench and on the air, making contacts on FT8 on 17m in no time at all !

I was amazed at how quickly I was having FT8 QSO’s, it was one after the other, and changing bands with the MAT tuner, made it very easy. I could hardly write down the backup log for FT4 as the contacts rolled in !

I also managed a Park-to-Park with M0OVE on FT4 – a real treat and was really excited. It took no time at all to get enough contacts (< 50 minutes) on FT8 and FT4, the antenna and radio was doing a great job. In terms of operation, I found the dipole much easier to use than the magloop as it didnt require me to re-tune each time.

Having made more than enough contacts, I tried SSTV, whilst reception was excellent, getting out on the busy ARRL contest weekend and a busy SSTV CoA was proving difficult, nethertheless I enjoyjed trying !

I tried for some telephony contacts, but the self-presribved midday cutoff was coming up and packing up would take a little while, so tided up and headed home.

Once home I had to work out how to update my ADIF file, which to the thanks of the excellent POTA website, was made easy, so I can add my P2P reference, sure enough,that uploaded without problem. I was really glad so many my digital mode QSO’s where fellow POTA hunters !

Hopefully i will get out again in March and I can enjoy using another antenna, I think its worth experiementing just to see how much a good antenna and 10W can really do !

Until then, 73 !