Like last year, I am staying in the Algarve, Portugal, for the month of October. The first week I spent with my wife and some very good friends. Now that they have gone (my wife needed to work), I have time “to play radio” and activate some of the nice nature reserves in the region. So, today I drove a little north of Silves and activated Herdade da Parra, CTFF-0233. This is a beautiful hilly region. In order to get a good take-off towards Europe and maybe some other continents you have to choose your location carefully. My initial choice was on the hilltop, but it appeared to be accessible by 4×4 drive only (very steep, rough gravel road). So my second choice was just along the M502 road on a gravel parking area. It was a rather high location with a clear view from West to East over North, so ideal for my target “audience”.
Conditions were quite different from last year. Now, 10 to 15m were wide open. On 10m the European signals were really loud. Short skip F2, wow ! The required 44 QSOs for a valid activation were quickly made. On 12m and 15m the European signals were also very good. Strangely enough DX signals were not that loud and very few inter-continental QSOs ended in the log. The weather was fantastic and my powerstation + solar panel were a happy twin. At the end of my activity I still had almost 75% of the energy available … and I used 100W output all the time.
Here are the stats after 3 hours of air time:
As you can see I even tried some SSB on 10m. Some loud Germans made it into the log, but it is not really my thing (CW rules …). And CT7/PF5X/P is just terrible in phone (in CW too, but N1MM does the hard work).
With this kind of weather and propagation, activating a WWFF reference is just sheer pleasure …
In the coming 10 days I plan to activate at least the following references:
CTFF-0076, -0077 and -0007. CUL !
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