Today was the VK1 (And most of the rest of VK!) [SOTA](http://sota.org.uk) party, and I did my first ever activation on Mt Ainslie, VK1/AC-040, and had a bit of fun! I learnt just how far down the hill the activation zone starts, 25m altitude is a bit further than I thought!
Here's my chair at the summit pole, the end fed antenna is strung up in the trees to the left.
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Today I'm at home watching the kids, and I decided to try some 20m contacts. After mucking about a bit with end fed half wave antennas, and not being happy with it, I decided to make the wire as per the instructions for the L-Match tuner I built (based on Peter, VK3YE's HF Portable youtube series), and 22m of wire appears to work much better than the 12m I did have.
I made a contact with Ron, VK3AFW portable 4, as he was doing a SOTA activation on VK4/SE105, which is a distance of 1249.8 km from home and I got a report of 5 and 7, which I hope isn't too bad with my 5 watts output.
Yay :)
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Well, after getting my MST2 in an enclosure and looking Ok:
I went to a friendly ham's workshop and started aligning it. The receive slug tuning and mixer balancing went perfectly well. When we got to doing the transmit tuning, things started to go a bit skee-whiff! The MST2 turned off. So we replaced the fuse, which promptly blew, and another!
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Well, yesterday we continued the odyssey, and got all the capacitors and transistors in, finishing off today with the transformers and chokes, pin headers and crystals, so we're all done for the easy bits!
I had a few oddities, the instructions specified 1.8pF NPO caps, but the kit came with 2pF caps in place. I have a left over 2 pin header (which I just realised should go on the VFO input!), and no 3 pin header for the DDS-VFO power, a bit odd, but easily worked around :)
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In continuation of my radio building, I have started on my [OzQRP](http://ozqrp.com) MST2, 20m band SSB radio kit. Ordered on Wednesday, it arrived Thursday afternoon! It helps that I live quite close to where they're sent from!
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