After being back nearly 3 weeks from the annual family visit to North East, Scotland or more precisely Elgin I thought I’d share what I had gotten up to, If you follow me on Twitter you might have spotted the odd tweet with a photo or some 140 character post saying how I was enjoying yet another dram or a pint!
This wasn’t the sole purpose of the trip mums side of the family are all based up in Elgin and surrounding area, plus I’m actually a Scot although lived in England for 99.9% of my life so far, so I can only declare that by birth certificate these days!
During the day was spent day tripping and we did manage to cram quite a bit in visiting Glen Moray & Benromach distillery, Inverness & Fort George, Aberdeen, and Lossiemouth a couple of times for walks along the beach but care had to be taken as there was plenty of heavy showers!
As we were staying at my grandmothers there’s always a possibility of taking some radio gear and doing some operating the last couple of years this was using a 2m handheld radio which is usually hardly ever used due to lack of activity.
This trip was slightly different though the shack had recently acquired a Yaesu FT-817ND, which is perfect size for travelling specially as I normally travel around on the train so with that and a quickly made nested dipole for 20 & 40m I was already to operate as 2M0SQL/P.
The antenna was setup in as an inverted V in gran’s back garden which seemed to work reasonably during the week I made a mixture of QSOs in both SSB & PSK although conditions did seem rather poor, it was a nice way to pass a sometime in the evenings.
What I did learn from the trip was that it would be nice to have antenna which covered a larger number of bands and since Dad (M3JFM) and myself have been looking at the possibility of picking up an MP-1 vertical, so keep an eye out to see what we’re using on future visits.