The 2015 International Lighthouse and Lightship Weekend took place at Walker Park adjacent to Girdleness Lighthouse re-activating callsign GB2GNL.
This year, the Aberdeen Amateur Radio Society used their Kenwood TS-590 with a GM4OBD’s home brew 40m loop and GM3WIJ’s dipole for 80m, 40m and 20m. Logging and DX cluster using the club PC running Ham Radio Deluxe. This again proved a successful setup for the maximum 100 watt output. No filtering was required with the QRO station being a little further away this year.
Allan Duncan, GM4ZUK’s QRO station in John Mann’s camper van consisted of an Elecraft K3 with P3 Panadapter, SPE Expert 1K-FA amplifier, Daiwa DC7100 rotator controller, Winkey CW keyer and PC logging with SD to a 3 element SteppIR beam atop of Allan’s new mobile tower.
We were surprised that, despite hearing strong 28MHz beacons, no one seemed to be acitvating this band. A bit of visual aurora late on Saturday was nice to see but didn’t do much for the HF bands which were poor for the early hours of Sunday.
A total of 1038 contacts were made over the two days. This is an amazing achievement considering this event is not a contest. Surprisingly, there have been 11 SWL reports so far this year via eQSL.
Flickr Photos, International Lighthouse and Lighthouse Weekend – 2015
3 videos included this year.