Perhaps one of the most fascinating things going on here in VK7 is the surge in interest in communications above 30Mhz. I think this is largely due to the poor HF propagation conditions and the release of the Icom IC-9700. I think the most visible manifestation of this is that the VHF/UHF field day contests in Tasmania suddenly have quite a few people involved.
I haven’t been able to give it my all in contests of late due to having heaps of things going on but this time I was able to go mobile as a rover between grid squares QE36 and QE37.
This time around my operations were pretty basic, using the IC-2720 in the car for 2m/70cm operations and an FT-2311 for 23cm, all on FM. It was also my first opportunity to use the 23cm yagi I built with the help of VK7MO in November.
I made 33 contacts through the afternoon which was a pretty casual effort given the amount of local activity, however there were some significant lessons learnt about mobile contesting
Being in Tasmania, the idea of “Winter Field Day” is not very appealing, but I think what I would really like to is build some decent, portable VHF/UHF yagis to be able to operate 50,144,430 and 1296 portable.