W4KAZ

Drove out to the mountains to hook up with N4YDU and N4PY for another great FD. The Stone Mt. site is just plain awesome. The set up was heavy on keeping it simple. We used 40m doublets and an 80m Vee operating 1A with a 6m setup.

One of the 40m antennas showed a high noise level again, which I expect is being generated locally. Probably something in the park restroom is generating the RFI. We had the same problem when we operated from the site previously. But thats all a part of FD – working through the problems.

The 56 ft doublets were a lot less impressive on top of a mountain than at the beach for IOTA, which is not really a surprise. I expect most of their performance in 2010 IOTA was due to ocean side proximity and propagation. Left to my own devices the first choice for 40m will forevermore be resonant dipoles or loops.

The FD wx was great. Overnight temps fell into the low 60’s or 50’s, which is a really nice change after afternoon temps in the 90’s.

And as always, operating with N4YDU and N4PY was great.

The only downside was there was no time before or after to get in a couple of days of camping and hiking the park trails.