18.07.2015. was set by meteorologists to be very hot day. That meant for me that I had to get away from city. My XYL requested that it has to be somewhere near cooling water. So we decided for canyon of Veliki Rzav, location near Roge village in vicinity of my city – Užice. You cannot do much better than canyoning on hot day, right?
Sitting in shade and doing nothing is not my style, so I packed my rig and equipment for portable operations to cut time.
I raised station few meters from river, equipment in tree shade and antenna in small open field few meters away. With high hills and trees all around I did not expect much.
Rig I used was FT-857D, and antenna was vertical dipole for 20m hanged on 7m high fishing pole. Duo to short pole, it acted more like one radial ground plane. In one occasion I moved radial to change directivity of antenna and it actually worked a bit.
First few QSO-s went surprisingly well, as I used 5 watts only, but soon I realized that band conditions were not that well, and location was far from suitable for radio (as I could expect much working from canyon), so I raised power to 35 watts, then tried 60 watts, and for most of the day I worked full 100 watts.
Power source was 47 Ah car battery fully charged which served very well.
Propagations were quite strange and all-time changing. I heard some stations very strongly, and other hardly. Some came with strong fading, other with shallow fading. In few occasions even whole band went silent.
Nevertheless, day was really a fun. Not just because of radio. Refreshing mountain river was also quite amusing.
Especially funny was when fisherman stumbled upon me, and after he saw 6m long fishing pole raised he asked me how fishing is going on. „Very good“, I replied, „I caught some Germans, Italians and few of others…“. He just gave me strange look and went away.
At the end of the day score was 23 QSOs with stations: DL65DARC, II9GFF, IN3FOX/P, OE3CDW, IZ0TTE, IV5DPZ/QRP, DF8ZH, MM0MWW/P, F/PA3EPA, F4GFE/P, G7SQW/M, YO3CYU, F4HCK, IZ8JJI/QRP, I6EH, EA6ALW/P, IJ6BKH, 5B4AKV, I0KQB/P, IX1CKN, IU7EHB, JY5IB, 4Z4DX.