First contact this morning was at 6:24 UTC before going to the job with PI4DX in the southern part of the Netherlands. PI4DX was booming in with S5, they don't need propagation at all...Of course I was at home and not mobile...At lunchbreak I went with the car to my favorite DX place. Setup the station and.....
I hate it when something does not work when you need it. In this case the 12V powercable to my FT-817 broke. So, I could do 2 things. Get back to the job and fix it and loose all my free time, I only have a hour at lunchbreak, or try and make some contacts on the internal battery. I've choosen the last option and made some valuable contacts with only 2,5W. The advantage was that I was at a excellent DX location on top of a dyke surrounded by nothing then wet farmland. Imagine that, using my converted DV27L (1/4 wave on 10m) most of the stations came in with S7-9+30. Unfortenately time was not on my side and I had to leave for the job again. I made 5 QSOs from the mobile though. The lucky ones were: MU0GSY, EA8AH, CT1DVV, CR2X and TM6M. Congrats picking up my tiny signal, I know it was not easy...
I decided to pull the original Yaesu fuseholder out and not repair it but just replace it by a professional car fuse holder. The advantage is that when it breaks it's easy to get fuses as every garage and DIY shop has them.
Finally I managed to shoot a video from my struggle to get EA8AH in the log. If you take a look you will see that 12V supply is on and off. And just when he answers my call it is going off permanently.
