ZL8X QSO party
Taiwan is a place with a very high population density, so you may perhaps imagine that large antennas are something not everyone can afford. If there is a chance to put a beam up, it will usually cover 20, 15 and 10m. On those bands, most hams here in Gaoxiong had already worked ZL8X, so this weekend we ventured to our monthly meeting ground, an abandoned factory area near the airport.
The plan was to put up dipoles for 80m and 17m, bands for which you rarely find antennas here in Taiwan. Our playground houses several shipping containers, some of which are used for storage. We put the centre of our dipoles on top of our "HQ container", which is actually two containers welded together.
Thanks to our enthusiasm we failed to notice that the second dipole we hung up was for 12m, not 17. Fortunately, this was not a problem for the tuner. I am not sure what the ZL8X crew is thinking when they are consecutively contacted by a bunch of people with similar call signs: BV7CW/BU/FO/GA/GC, BX7AAH/AAI etc, but it was fun. I guess one of the SP OMs was working 17m then, because he also spoke pretty good Russian.
These dipoles were only temporary installations, but as soon as BV7BU, our chief here in the south, got the HQ raised to three container heights we will install permanent dipoles there. I did some measurements today and found that even a 160m dipole is possible. Nice...
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