By the way, considering that everything in Australia costs 2-5 times more than in the rest of the world, and the cheapest price for this antenna in VK I found was AU $ 599 (US $630) plus postage, I have ordered mine via DX Engineering in the USA . It came in three days from Ohio and it costs AU $280 (US $294) including express delivery.

• DL/VK4DX - QRV from Munich from 21-25 May 2009.
• E7/VK4DX – QRV from Bosnia from 26 May – 16 June 2009 and 11-27 July 2011.

QSL via VK bureau or direct to my home address.

Last Sunday I have installed a 5 element 6m yagi antenna (A50-5S), approximately 8m high with an instant reward – 5 JAs in log that evening. I also had another new country on 6m the next day – FK. Okay, when you have worked total of about 5 countries on one band, it’s fairly normal that every other contact is a new-one, hi!

The only thing I didn’t like about the whole experience was the armstrong rotator, but I guess I’ll get that addressed fairly soon.

Cleveland Point is located approximately 20km south-east from Brisbane and it’s almost completely surrounded with the salt water. I parked my car approximately 10m from the water line, near the lighthouse.

The conditions on 17m were exceptionally good. I worked about 200 stations in a few hours, mostly JAs, but I logged about two dozens of europeans as well.

I used my new 10 inch Eee PC netbook for logging. This little thing is brilliant, the battery lasts well over 6 hours with Wi-Fi and bluetooth off and it was heaps easier logging directly into the PC then using paper log and then re-entering all the contacts manually.

I worked several mobile stations from Japan, most notably Nori, JA7OXR/M whom I worked on both CW and SSB. Mobile-to-mobile fun.

The conditions were pretty good on 17m, worked quite a few JAs and several Europeans, mostly on CW. The highlight was the report 58 from DL station on SSB.