The Bunkers on the Air event started on Sunday 1st October 2023 and I wanted to get involved early so I set off at 0600 on Sunday to Activate B/G-1054 ROC Five Barrow.
Weather was not good, although it was fairly warm its was foggy wet and windy so instead of the planned was up the hill to activate on top of the site of the Monitoring post I parked the car 700m away (well within the permitted 1000m) and set up in the fog.
There is somewhere to park on the road opposite the bunker site (not visible in the distance in the photo above!) but parking here is better for VHF which would form part of the activation.
I Initially set up for 40m using the M1ECC antennas Slidewinder Coil and Mil Whip. Didn’t make any QSOs on 40m thanks to some contests.
John G6ASK reads the RSGB News at 0900 on a Sunday so I knew that I would be able to make some contacts on 2m once that finished so at 0930 I was off to a good start making 5 contacts, not too bad at all, 2m is very quiet around here, in fact I left one radio on 2m all day and only heard 3 or 4 people using it.
After making a coffee in the fog I got back on 40m and found another bunker activation on 7.162 and made my first HF contact bunker to bunker to M0DXT/P.
Continuing after the contest ended at 1200UTC I was able to make another 24 contacts bringing the total to 30 – 5 more that i needed to complete the activation.
I had.a good day and most of the QSOs I had resulted in a bit of chat which was great. One notable QSO was bunker to number to Chris, G1CFG who owns his ROC Bunker and was Operating from inside it, have a look at his QRZ page for some pictures. Pretty cool.
Just before the afternoon session I put up a dipole to give me a little more help, M1ECC Slidewinder is a great compromise antenna but the dipole did better and although I was at the side of the road there wasnt anyone else stopping here so didnt need to worry about anyone messing with it 🙂
The activation ended at about 1345UTC mainly because I received a very important message about my dinner 🙂
I plan to come back if we get better weather this month, this Bunker Site is about 12 miles from home so I can easily get here on my bicycle and get up the hill to perform another activation from the site of the bunker.
Thanks to all that I had a QSO with. Looking forward to some more of these.
Equipment used for this activation
Both my IC-705 radios
M1ECC Antennals Slidewinder Coil and Militart Whip
SOTABEAMS Linked Dipole – Set for 40m.
73
Mark M0IAX