VK3ILH at Port Albert Maritime Museum – ILLW 2018

Well, Deal Island was the aim this year, the less than perfect weather sealed the Deal. 3-4 metre swells in Bass Strait, and that was the smaller swell, rain, hail and wind on Sunday. But the Port Albert Maritime Museum is no second prize either. Its full of historical maritime artefacts, a real hidden gem, and the home to the Citadel Lighthouse.

Operating from the museum also gives you exposure to the public, and gives  them insight to our hobby. Plus  operating QTH couldn’t get much better, warm sheltered, tea, coffee, and great support from the museum staff. A short walk across the road, fabulous local coffee shop. Great cappuccino, and carrot cake, cheese cake, then you can work your way through the real menu. 

Yes we made some contacts, it just wasn’t all coffee and cheese cake, filled two pages of the log, plenty of ZL’s, VK’s, DX of note New Caledonia, France, USA. We had some issues  with the 80m dipole section of the antenna, so operated from 40m onwards.

Band conditions generally poor, but we made some good contacts. Low noise levels at Port Albert, and enjoyed ourselves. Kept the feet dry too.

So what about Deal, have registered again for 2019… tough time of year to cross Bass Strait. So I plan to do a summer crossing, maybe 4 days and operate a DX expedition, also IOTA.  Thanks to Darrin VK3VDP who came to Port Albert and shared the load, plus he rolls a length of coax to precision. Impressive…

Regards,

Glenn VK3CAM

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Hi all, what a great short story from Glenn. Please share your stories by emailing bulletin@emdrc.com.au with some words and photos. If you can try and keep photos a reasonable size and we can resize them if needed – or drop a line and we can sort something out for larger files. Regards Ed.