In the weekend of 5 and 6 September we participated with the UBA Ninove-section in the UBA SSB Fieldday. This is a regional fieldday, but it coincides with the IARU Region 1 SSB Fieldday. We were in the 24h restricted category, meaning we only operated 160, 80 and 40m with 100W.

The for the F/ON6JUN special-event homebrew antenna died an unfortunate death so a replacement was built, this time with an actual balun. It was hoisted up a stacked elements mast.

The crew consisted of Hugo ON4AAA, Hans ON5LB, Xavier ON4ALY, Gaston ON6FC and me, with support from Wim ON4BHQ and Freddy ON3FDS. We stayed in a lovely campervan on a plot in Waarbeke, a small village close to Ninove. Power was generated by a small generator with a back-up generator, because you never know.

Xavier made a shift-planning for the operations, and I volunteered for the night-shift (somebody has to do the less popular hours, hi).

We had some tiny issues like accidently touching a wrong control-knob, or a headset not working properly, but there were no dramatic issues like powercuts or computercrashes. For me it’s the first-time in a fieldday were everything ran smooth! For a test we used a groundloop for improved reception, but this didn’t work as expected, and picked up noise from the generator as well, so this topic needs another look.

Obviously with only 3 bands to use, the amount of available QSO’s dropped tremendously on Sunday, but nevertheless we persisted. We were on-air the full 24 hours and ended with 640 QSO’s and 124644 points.