OPERATING FROM A CARAVAN

The setup

The setup while operating on holiday from our own caravan is fairly basic. The caravan is a Lunar Astara 462.

To those unused to caravans the outfit is a two-berth caravan, the body of which is approximately 18ft. The caravan is equipped with a shower and of course a toilet in the end bathroom and the kitchen is furnished with a four-burner gas stove with oven, and a three-fuel fridge, (gas, mains or 12 volt electrics). The other main part is the awning, the size of which is 18ft. long, by 7ft. deep. The awning is used during the day time or evening as a sun lounge, as all the sides can be opened out. The "tug" for the caravan is a Ford Galaxy Turbo Diesel, so weight and bulk of equipment is not a factor.

One corner of the awning is taken up by the shack. All the equipment goes on a 3ft. x 2ft. folding table. The rig, a Yaesu FT897 with its accompanying AT897 ATU by LDG, is accompanied by a pocket size tape recorder and of course the log book.

For antennas I used a half size G5RV which is erected as an inverted V on a 9-metre roach pole, which closes down to a 1 metre long tube, and four guy lines. The butt end of the roach pole slides over a caravan television mast socket which screws into the ground, in a similar fashion to the dog ties. This stood up to a force eight gale with no trouble. Using the inverted V formation is quite safe on this site as so far in four years there has never been anyone with children on the site, very nice and quiet. For VHF and UHF I mount a tri-band colinnear on a 3-section caravan television aerial pole which is mounted through the centre of a video camera tripod which is nailed to the ground quite literally with awning rock pegs (10inch nails with a short cross bar welded on, and guy lines.)

The Site

The site we use is a Caravan Club CL site, a 5-caravan site limited to Caravan Club Members. The site is in Cornwall near St. Austell, about 3 miles from the Eden Project, up in the White Mountains as they call them. In reality the white mountains are the spoil heaps from the china clay pits.

Operating

Most evenings I join the Cornish net which runs on the Newquay repeater on 145.725MHz. This repeater would otherwise get very little use during the evenings and the net ranges from close to Lands End to Saltash and Plymouth with Devon stations joining in. Many visitors join the net through the year. On good conditions the repeater gets Guernsey and French stations calling in with quite a few stations from the Cork area of Ireland.

Due to the fact that marital harmony has to be maintained my operating is limited to early morning and evening operating, although the occasional 6 metre operating during late afternoon if we happen to be "home" early does occur. This area of Cornwall is the highest inhabited part, and does fairly well for Spain and Portugal on 6 metres.

I get away with the evening operating due to the fact that the television programmes that my wife watches are not my cup of tea, and a judicial bit of moaning about them gets me banished to the awning, and the only interruptions I get are demands for cups of tea to make for 'er indoors, a small price to pay for some quality operating time.

The last time down there I obtained a Freeview box to add to the television to get the XYL more variety of programmes. This worked very well due to the height of the site. The site is owned by an ex-ham, who has given it up to concentrate of vintage cars.

Dave M1EFA

All images are ©2004 by Dave M1EFA and used with permission