01/31/2006 | WB2AMU Wow, there was no snow in the Northeast for the January VHF contest for a change! In fact, the weather reached the mid-50s on Saturday and it made it a pleasure to be doing QRP portable outside on a hill in Long Island. I also was happy to have my FT-100 finally back from repair from Yaesu after several months in time for the contest.

Conditions were typical for wintertime VHF activity, line-of-site work with moderate tropo, some noise and not a lot of stations to work. One of the highlights for me was that I worked five stations in two grids on 222 MHz FM using a 5 Watt HT with a rubber duck! Another interesting find was that the Two Meter three element beam worked pretty good on 432 MHz as a multi-wave dipole!

No enhanced propagation such as Sporadic-E was observed from my location.

I would like to comment that going to portable locations and running QRP in an outdoor environment is really in a different class than those who operate at their home station running portable power. Gee, there is no comparison between a home station that has a 100 foot tower and one operating portable with a 15 foot high beam! It is not the same, nor is it as much fun!

73

KEN WB2AMU -- WB2AMU