Goodbye summer

Summer is dragging its last days. After three periods of high temperatures and the biggest fires that stroke Greece last 100 years, it is going to live us, fortunately. This week, temperature dropped dramatically to 15-20 degrees, quite low for the season in Greece. Anyway this weather development gave us the signal to leave cottage and come back to main QTH.

During summer only a little ham radio activity took place. The portable situation, you can see the wire antennas on the picture, does not give many possibilities during low propagation periods. So we continue the 6 meters marathon. We got 42 countries this year. Not bad. Next year we will go better. We also participate in the SARGT RTTY contest. It was a nice experience indeed. We made 230 qso, as a multiband operator. Lots of exotic callsigns were heard and worked, even with portable conditions.

By the way the ACOM1000 returned strong and healthy. It took only a week to be fixed and come back. The problem was a leakage of a capacitor in the main PCB (the picture shows these capacitors). Not a big deal indeed. As I had commented, it had to pass through children’s illnesses before go to real service. But the ACOM service was quite fast and friendly. My compliments to Stan (LZ1IU) and his great company. Now I feel ready for the WW CQ RTTY contest at 29-30 of September weekend.