It started with a beautiful Saturday. The weather in Hobart was nicer than it has been for months and refusing to stay inside, I went outside to play with antennas. I wasn't certain about the health of my HF dipole, which is constructed largely from a broomstick and gaffer tape, so I took it down for a little TLC.

Some conductivity checks showed that there were still good connections to both of the legs of about 12 metres of 12 gauge, and a short hadn't developed either. Excellent. I put it back up, running the wire into a tree on one side and over some balcony on the other so that it was a bit higher than before. Unfortunately it was running against some metal structure, but when I fired it up it tuned up fine with the tuner and I was receiving VK2, VK3 and VK4 stations fine.

It was about 2PM by now, and listening to the lighthouse stations on 40m I heard mention of the RD Contest. I panicked briefly and checked the date---oops, it was starting in a few hours. I still hadn't learned CW as I'd hoped I would by this point, but I continued to monitor HF until I had the disconcerting experience of the noise floor dropping by about 20dB suddenly.

I wandered outside and sure enough the tree-tied half of my antenna had become well-grounded. By, er, falling onto the ground.

Oops. Something to work on when the weather improves. I plan to make a more solid mounting platform for both the dipole wires and the coax feed with some strain relief. Rather than, say, nails and tape.

I went on to participate in the contest using 2m and 70cm with my Yaesu VX-6R HT attached alternately to the 70cm yagi and 2m 5/8 vertical visible in the above picture.

Sadly it was fairly quiet on VHF this year. Overall I heard only 10 or so southern VK7 VHF stations, and through less than stellar effort I managed to make 54 contacts over the 24 hours. Those who pulled all nighters such as Danny VK7HDM and Justin VK7TW made approximately 160. With the low number of participating stations the spread of contacts was determined by how late you were willing to stay up and whether you had the hardware to manage all the different modes and bands. (I didn't hear about anyone doing CW, though I'd be willing to give it a shot with an appropriate rig.)

There may not have been many people, but it was fun all the same. I had some good chats with people I hadn't spoken to for a while between the not-so-frenzied number swapping. We agreed that we definitely need to get some F-calls in on the excitement for next year.

As for the commemorative side of the contest---remembering the radio operators who died serving in wartime---lest we forget.