OH6R antenna farm after sunset
OH6R
is callsign
of a small radio amateur club located in west coast of Finland. It was
founded couple years ago when one letter suffixes were granted only for
club
stations. So we founded a club of our own. We have only five members,
all
licensed radio amateurs and they are all members of our family. And
that’s the
way we like to keep it. Other hams are of course welcome to join all
our
activities. Luckily we have some good friends helping with our project.
Starting
2008 private amateurs can get short callsigns and OG-prefixes in
Finland.
We
have
been building amateur radio station at our summer house last two
summers. So far we
have built several towers and some antennas.
Currently we have separate towers for 10, 15, 20 and 40m antennas.
Heights vary
from 30 to 42 meters. Those are holding 9 yagi antennas with total of
42
elements. Some pictures can be found here.
We have still some plans to enlarge
our antenna farm as soon as weather allows. Two towers are still
waiting to be
set up and some 300kgs of different sizes of aluminium tubing is
waiting to be connected to each other.
However
nothing
seems to be enough. Our location up here in north is not favouring our
activities. It really hurts to see final results of major contests. A
talented QRP-operator
with average antennas located in Northern Africa or Caribbean can
easily beat
our best effort running 1,5kW here with our monobander antennas.
Well,
we
are not taking it too seriously. Our favourite way of contesting is
multi
operator class in RTTY-contests. Multi operating is always fun, but
especially
in RTTY contests. Operating SSB is too noisy and operating CW takes too
much
effort. You really need to concentrate in listening morse code.
Operating RTTY is
as much fun, but you can do some other things in the same time. For us
RTTY
contest is a weekend full of nice chats, jokes, good food and some
beers!
Inside
our
shack we have four full powered stations.
Currently radios are two TS850s and two FT1000MP mk-Vs. We
are using N1MM logger and five computers
are networked but so far we don’t have any automation in our
system. We have
been building the system with low budget and noticed that an Euro spent
in
antennas is giving better value for us than other spent in automation.
My
apologies, if you are waiting for our qsl. Cards are already received,
but I
have compatibility problems with my printer. I have some 18 000 qsos
waiting to
be printed as soon as I solve the problem with BV7 by DF3CB. During the
winter
it is too cold to do any antenna work so there are changes that
I’ll get the
cards printed.
Making
proper homepages is not on the top of our priorities. So
don’t wait any major
updates here in near future. This domain is mainly for our email use
and we
store some pictures here mostly for our own fun. Feel free to browse
this site
for those pictures and give me any feedback if you like.
If
you are
interested in feeling how bad the propagation is here in Northern
Europe, drop
me a mail and let’s see when you can visit us. In winter we
do have plenty of
snow to see and if you are lucky you might see some northern lights
also. Well
then you might consider yourself unlucky also since then you
won’t be able to
make any qsos on HF.
Hope to meet you all in future contests also. We will be back
competiting against aurora and our own old scores at least in major
RTTY contests.
73 de pete, oh3mep
email:
oh3mep (at) radiola.fi
Minor update on 30th of January 2010
