As explained in the previous posts, I was unable to join in this event for most of the first half of the year. Apart from lacking energy I was unable to drive myself to even local summits. So I was limited to activating 3 summits in the first half of the challenge.

By the end of the year I had activated 38 summits and gained a reasonable number of points through the number of unique chasers I had contacted.

I did join in the ARRL 10m contest in mid-December, though it boosted my unique chaser count by only 19 contacts, including ssb and cw modes. I had hoped to gain more than that but in the end the couple of hours spent during the first day was only enough to gain a handful of new uniques, and the 4 hours on day 2 gained the rest. I found it was necessary to run at least 50w output and mostly I used 100w from the IC706.

I did try the kX3 with the 100w amplifier but there was a fault in my cabling, with the kX3 detecting a poor load and other effects that I now put down to an incompletely installed PL259 (ugh) on the input to the KXPA100 amplifier. PL259 might be ok for plumbing but for low power RF they are ridiculous. Elecraft put a BNC socket on the kX3 and should have matched that with another BNC socket on the input to the amplifier. The power required by the amplifier for full output is only 5w so it’s not as if it is called on to handle 50 amps. Bad move, elecraft. But on the other hand I should have screwed the connector on more accurately. Must have resulted in a poor match and some RF feedback resulted. Wasted several hours trying to get contest contacts with 30-50w. The second day I avoided all that by using the IC706 mobile rig at 100w.

I did attend two conferences, a VKFF meetup at Bendigo in October and a technical symposium in Hobart. I drove to both events, taking the ferry from Geelong to Devonport. En route to the ferry I managed to activate on 10m on 5 new unique summits. 4 of those were near Ballarat and new uniques for my activator log, the other was near Macedon. Signals from Macedon to Melbourne stations on 10m were very strong and I was surprised to work only a few Melbourne stations on 10m.

While in Hobart I activated several nearby summits including Mt Wellington of course, and Mt Rumney. This helped my 10m challenge score as I had so many unique summits to catch up on. On arrival back in Geelong I was generously taken up Flinders peak nearby, by Andrew VK3AAR. Having never activated this one before, this was an all time new unique for me too.

I found the 10m challenge a great amount of fun and as I built a copy of Andrew VK1AD’s design for a half wave vertical dipole, it gave me a new antenna option for 10m in future. I am fairly sure the vertical dipole performed at least an S point better than the zs6bkw doublet on 10m. Using the vertical produced instantly better results and I used it exclusively on 10m after using it the first time.

Photos – I have unfortunately lost the habit of taking photos of my station setup on summits. I find that when packing up the station, the last thing I find is the camera, and of course I could use the iPhone at any time. So I’m trying to get back into that habit.

Still, here are a few I remembered to take, or that Andrew VK1AD took while I was operating on one of the joint activations.

Back home after the tassie trip, i activated Isaacs Ridge in south Canberra. I remembered to take a photo.

My final activation for the 10m challenge was at Mt Foxlow vk2/st-010 on the morning of the 1st January 2025. With an unexpected delay due to a tree lying across the access trail, my operating time was limited to about 45 minutes before UTC midnight (local time 11AM), but I did manage to make some contacts on 10m.