Kev's Radio Adventures

The English Lighthouse Challenge has been in the making for over a year. Bob, M0MJA, has put a profound amount of effort into growing ELA and it has exploded in the last few months just based off of the large number of new members to the Facebook group: The Official English Castles & Lighthouses Awards Group. The 2 groups have combined because the activators and hunters were often the same operators anyway. Personally, I think combining them has has a huge impact in how quickly ELA has grown. For months I've been planning on participating as an activator for the English Lighthouse Challenge and my wife has been nothing but supportive (thanks, Heather!). I had goals to activate 14 references over the week of the challenge. The pragmatist in me knew that those goals were too lofty for my busy life. It turns out that 10 was the magic number. I'm happy with that! The first lighthouse I ever activated was the first blogpost here. Lighthouse activation numbers 2-10 are chronicled...

I headed north on a crisp, windy day with my son, Mick, as my passenger along for the adventure. With us we had the Xiegu X6100, KM4ACK End Fed Half-Wave, and a SOTABEAMS 7000HDS telescopic mast (not to mention the trusty Nintendo Switch Lite). The drive was about an hour and when we saw the sea, we knew we were close.  The car park at the Hunstanton Cliffs was not busy for a day in October without rain, but much like so many car parks in the UK, the app that is used to pay is of course different that they two apps that I have set up from my phone. No matter. A short drive and we found along the road free parking, it only came with a bit of a walk. We headed off with hope in our hearts and dreams of QRP activation. This was to be my first English Lighthouse activation. We set up with the SOTABEAMS mast strapped to the fence in the back of the aforementioned car park and ran the top of the end fed down and brought the feed point side strapped to the fence with the antenna pointed so...