ON7DQ Friedrichshafen 2024 - Day 1

We left our hometown Ostend at 05:26 local time, and as usual, we had our breakfast along the road.
This is the APRS track of the first day, total distance was 479 km.

First stop was the city of Königswinter, which is along the Rhine river, and near the big city of Bonn.
It is also near the Siebengebirge, which is a POTA park, and contains a few SOTA summits (Ölberg, Asberg).
Königswinter is famous for it's Drachenfels ruins, so we took the oldest cog railroad in Germany (see https://www.drachenfelsbahn.de/en/), to have some nice views of the Rhine and the surroundings. 

The Drachensfels ruins were a bit disappointing, only half of a tower is left, and it is not accessible.

In the distance, I noticed a big white "mushroom", which looked more interesting.
I found out later that it is the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques FHR in Wachtberg (see https://www.fhr.fraunhofer.de/en.html ).

DM/RP-426, Montabaurer Höhe - 545m, 4 points
POTA DE-0037 Nassau Nature Park

After the visit we drove to pos 50.430147, 7.747459, which is near the Köppel tower. The tower and the parking spot are not in the activation zone for SOTA but would be ok for POTA.

So after a quick lunch, we walked some 100m to the West, where the forest track rises to 530m altitude, and found a nice place in the AZ to set up.

I had to make it a short activation because it would be a long day ... we still had still some driving to do.
I made only 12 QSO's here, including 1 S2S, no DX.

After another stop in the Fashion Outlet in Montabaur, we drove to our AirBnB in Villmar, where we arrived around 18:15.

 I was surprised to see a whole bunch of VHF/UHF/SHF antennas on the property !
They were all small Yagi’s, helical antennas, cross dipoles, satellite dishes,  etc. As it turned out , our host was David, DL0227SWL. He’s a very active SWL, and you can imagine we had some nice conversations.

NTC QSO Party

I am a member of the Netherlands Telegraphy Club (NTC, see their website) 

As it happened, the monthly NTC QSO Party was on this day !
If I wanted to keep my position in the rankings, I just had to participate.

Now, we brought our own dinner, which saved us from going out and search  for a restaurant.
That way I could get ready for the QP in time. The house had a nice garden to set up my antenna, and I had a large “operating desk” on the terrace. 

What could I wish more? Oh yes, the Xmas lights  … David was so kind to put them on, even if it was in the middle of June … how cosy, hi.

And as I still wanted to enter the “mechanical key” section, I had packed my miniature Travel Cootie, it fits inside a pill bottle!

I was using an Icom IC-705 at 10 Watts, a modified ATU-100 autotuner, and a 22.3m random endfed wire in an inverted-V configuration (max. height 5.5m).

I didn’t make as many QSO’s as I could have made from my home station, but still got 9 contacts, which included SM, PA, DL, I, and OK. 

So I still had some good old CW fun, mission accomplished !

At 22:00 local I packed my stuff and then it was bedtime ... this had been a very long day !  

Continue reading ... go to DAY 2

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