Exercise Blue Ham Day 1

Great day on Exercise Blue Ham, we have set up the club station with a 60m flat NVIS dipole at 5.8m height above ground, engineered by Chaz and rigged by Chaz, Richard and Matt. From the Blue Ham 2019 score table (NB this is only live on the 16-17 March 2019) today we worked

Contacts for MX0IOA = 7 MRE44(5.403),MRE21(5304),MRE21(5403.5),MRE44(5395),MRE77(5.32),MRE21(5301),MRE88(5.301),

Most of the cadet stations came on in the early afternoon, but Chaz worked the first on in the morning soon after we had rigged and tuned the antenna.

AARC Chairman Matt M3MMZ at the dipole centre

Looking down the antenna, there is clearance between the unused phone line and the antenna despite the look of this pic

Martin G5FM working one of the MRE stations

SWR of antenna left slightly too long, we let the rig tuner take out the rest

Day 2

What we learned from this exercise

Our antenna was 5.8m above ground, with a ground wire in line with the antenna laid on the ground and a little bit longer than the dipole. This was to act as a reflector. We used a SOTAbeams balun at the dipole centre, internally this is a piece of thin RG174 coax wound around a toroid core.