This weekend I am heading up Gilwell Park to do more work on the VK3SCG JOTA station. We have progressed well over the past 18 months but there are still a few more things to be done.
Last time we were there we installed the two rotators at the tower top and a box to terminate the control cable in. The plan is to run a multi-core cable from inside the station to the box at the top and then run a cable out to each rotator. This gives us the flexibility to change the rotators at a later stage and not have to re-run the control cable.
We have two rotators on the tower, one turns the VHF & UHF array and one turns the HB33DX three element HF yagi.
The VHF/UHF array is made up of the following antennas
- Diamond VX1000 tri band vertical
- Cushcraft 17 element 144 MHz horizontal Yagi
- Cushcraft 10 element 146 MHz vertical Yagi
- Cushcraft 11 element 436 MHz vertical Yagi
Also this weekend is the annual Oceania DX contest, OCDX for short, where the emphasis is on other continents contacting Oceania stations and Oceania stations working everybody. I’m planning to enter a multi-operator, two transmitter low power, entry using the VK3SCG call sign and tower.
If I find that I am the only one left at the end of the day then it will become a single operator low power entry just for me. I need to confirm some more stations for my DXCC and this might just be a good way to do it.
73