---
title: "Stiphoutse bossen, Mikboomweg"
date: "2025-07-19"
language: "en"
pota-locator: "NL-0233"
bands: "20m, 40m"
mode: "SSB"
transceiver: "Yaesu FT-897, Icom IC-705"
total-unique-qso: "8"
antenna: "Endfed"
---

A nice warm day to set up a small station, but sadly I did not make many QSO's with my own setup.

I located my station in the area next to a road.

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      alt="location"
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    <a href="/images/radio/fielddays/2025-07-19/20250719_gps-w800.webp">
      location
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Using my Endfed antenna.

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      alt="antenna"
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      antenna
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This time I tried using a throwing weight to get my antenna up in the tree. This worked really well.

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      alt="throwing-weight"
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    <a href="/images/radio/fielddays/2025-07-19/20250719_throwing_weight-w800.webp">
      throwing-weight
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However, I transmitted at 15 watt, which does not really make you stand out. Only one Polish station and one German station managed to hear me to make a contact. What often happens is that after I claimed an empty frequency, suddenly other stations start talking over my signal. Without asking if the frequency is in use. Because of my weak signal, I am probably not heard by them when calling CQ. So I cannot really blame them for claiming the frequency, but it did lessen my fun that day.

After a while I decided to seek out PE0CD's station, which was also set up in the same park. He allowed me to make use of his setup (an Icom IC-705) so I managed to make enough QSO to make my activation count. This saved the day for me!

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      srcset="/images/radio/fielddays/2025-07-19/20250719_PE0CD-w240.webp"
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      srcset="/images/radio/fielddays/2025-07-19/20250719_PE0CD-w480.webp"
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    <img
      src="/images/radio/fielddays/2025-07-19/20250719_PE0CD-w800.webp"
      alt="PE0CD"
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      PE0CD
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</figure>
