Today saw an unexpected trip to Morwell and a chance to work another National Park for the Keith Roget Memorial National Parks Award.
I arrived at Morwell National Park at around 9:30 am and was initially surprised by the size of the park. It really is quite small.
I set about getting a line in a tree and shortly had my full wave quad loop in the air and I was calling CQ.
I called for about 15 minutes on the quad loop but got no response. I then decided to swap over to a simple 1/2 wave dipole. One thing I noticed right away was on the dipole I could hear the ignition noise of my car engine. This was not audible on the quad loop. I switched on the noise blanker and that took care of the annoying peck, peck, peck noise.
I again gave a few calls with no success and then tuned around a little.
I heard a station calling CQ and it was Felix VK4FUQ. Felix and I had worked back in November and he told me about the full wave quad loop that he was running. It was his experience with loops that got me to make one the same day.Today however he was trying out a delta loop.
Signals were between S9 and S0 as the band moved in and out but we had a good QSO for about 15 minutes.
It was good to hear from Felix again, and even better to get another contact for the Award.
Now I can update my national park map again.
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