SV5/G4OBK Holiday DXpedition -- Kos Sept 2002:

It's always a gamble taking a rig and antenna with you on holiday - I've done it three times now in the Greek Islands and been lucky to be able to operate on the HF bands.

It's mid afternoon as the tour operator's bus approaches our holiday Apartment… Always a tense time as one's eyes focus on the environs, and whether it will be possible to put up some sort of HF antenna. My XYL Judy and I had decided 3 weeks previously to book a "cheap holiday"; at short notice. *Kos Island in the Dodecanese (SV5) seemed appropriate. A visit to the *Olympic Holidays website paid off and we bought a holiday for two for the brochure price of one. From the Ham Radio point of view it's important to follow a few basic guidelines when booking - I look for self catering, a two or at most three story block located on the outskirts or just outside the town. As we arrived we seemed to have the ideal spot at Miros Apartments, which lie on the northern coast of Kos across from the Bodrum Peninsular, a mere 6 Km from the Turkish coast. The 32-bedroom complex consisted of three blocks of apartments set back from the road, surrounded by a tomato plantation and a cow field. It was about 1 Km outside the village of Tingaki. When we booked we had requested "top floor", but there are never any guarantees and we ended up on the 2nd of 3 floors.

A few weeks before our trip I'd read an article by Tom GM4FDM in the GMDX Digest regarding *MMTTY. Reading it whetted my appetite so I downloaded it. Thanks Tom for the recommendation - it's a great program. My intention was to spend some considerable time on RTTY as our visit fell over the CQWW RTTY Contest weekend and SV5 is still pretty scarce on Data modes.

Airport security everywhere is tight these days and Manchester was no exception - a newly purchased second hand Laptop, IC706 and switch mode PSU went into my hand luggage, the 11m telescopic tower (*DK9SQ pole) was checked in at the special fragile items desk, and my suitcase carried the MFJ ATU, 40m doublet with 300 ohm ribbon, keyer, *G3LIV Data interface, mike, phones, extra wire, tywraps, tape, etc. No problems whatsoever - even though my hand luggage was 8 Kg, I wasn't asked to weight it.

Back to Kos and I realized that if I could get on the apartment roof discreetly I could maybe fix up my doublet and drop the feeder down the side of a drainpipe onto our balcony and into the room through the patio doors. I found an unlocked door on the 3rd story and raced to the roof. It was possible if I scaled a 5-foot wall on top that I could strap my pole to the water heater and solar heating unit and this is what I did. The DK9SQ fiberglass pole was shortened to around 7 meters and this gave me a center fed inverted-V doublet at around 18m AGL. One end was tied off to another water heater on the roof and the other to a tree in the gardens. The 300-ohm ribbon was dropped down to our balcony below and hooked up the ATU. So after earlier visits in the 1990's to SV9 Crete and SV5 Rhodes I was back in business as SV5/G4OBK. The plan was to spend around 2 hours or so on the bands each day but find more time to be active during the RTTY Contest weekend - September 28th/29th - which is why, this year, I didn't make the GMDX Convention!

The manager of the apartments was an English lady - the owner was Greek and very busy. I decided to gamble and not trouble them by asking for permission to operate. The antenna was now on top of the building, but you really had to look for it - you could just spot it if you stood at the edge of the swimming pool. The gear was left on full view in the room for the cleaner to see. Nothing was said and my operations went unhindered for the next 12 days. I'd bought the notebook PC, a Compaq Armada 533 MHz on the *E-bay auction site four days before we left for Kos. When it arrived it was loaded with Windows ME and there wasn't time to source a copy of Windows 98. I know why Microsoft called it ME - it's an unstable operating system which seems to suffer from the dreaded ME as I soon found out. Lockups were the order of the day and in the course of my activity I must have rebooted the machine at least 50 times. I had to remove the battery on a number of occasions before I could switch the PC on again. Running without an earth didn't help. The PC is now very well and stable on Win 98SE. I used MMTTY for RTTY and *Turbolog in DXpedition mode for logging and memory keying. I also tried PSK31 using *Digipan but after a handful of QSOs in that mode I got tired of operators telling me how much RAM they had, their shoe size, etc. etc. The rate was about one third what I could work on RTTY so I stuck with that as operating time was limited - I didn't want to wreck the holiday for Judy who was getting used to me nipping up to the room for an hour or two during the days we spent getting a "bronzie" lounging around the pool. Whilst my main operating mode is CW I've been using RTTY with a terminal unit for around 4 years on and off. I still rate myself as a novice on RTTY though, and before my trip to Kos had never called CQ on the mode. Like Tom GM4FDM I can recommend RTTY using soundcard software. It's more enjoyable and lends itself to DXpedition type activity. The pile ups on RTTY were interesting - and I found that sometimes it was possible to pick out maybe two or three callsigns from each standby and work each one individually before calling QRZ again. This method however required more typing rather than "mousing the callsign" into the log.

So how did we do - in the CQWW/RJ RTTY contest I managed 18 hours activity and made 633 QSOs. The log was easily converted to Cabrillo format within MMTTY for submission. In addition I made another 166 RTTY QSOs out with the contest, 1016 in CW and just a handful each in PSK and SSB. SV5 was sought after in all modes but undoubtedly it was needed on RTTY the most - at present I am receiving an average of 3 direct RTTY requests for QSL cards every day.

On the morning of departure I removed the antenna from the roof and packed, no problems returning, however this time the airport check-in insisted that my DK9SQ telescopic tower traveled with the hand luggage as there wasn't a check-in for fragile items - that's "No Problem" -- Greece for you!

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