Since I will not be heading out to any mountains for a bit thanks for pandemic-related movement restrictions, it’s a good time to catch up on posting my last couple expeditions: 5B/CY-009 and 5B/CY-018, which I managed to activate earlier this month. Both are near the northwest corner of the island, so a significant drive from where I am based in Nicosia.
Moutti tis Zacharou is an eight point mount — a bit of a switch for me since most of the ones I have visited lately have been one or two point peaks. Of course, the point value has nothing to do with how hard it is to activate. This is very much a drive up peak. GoogleMaps shows the road up and the building that sits at the very top.
A well-maintened dirt road branches off E740 at 35.0478,32.6214 and winds upwards.
On the drive up, I noticed the building atop the peak from some distance.
At the top of this road is a nice flat area and this sign. To the right of the sign, a road continues up to the building, but the building is surrounded by a fence, so the actual peak is not accessible. That’s not a problem, the parking area is just a bit lower and a wire in the trees will clear the peak.
If I had been thinking, I wouldn’t have deployed the BuddiPole — there were perfectly good trees for my end-fed halfwave antenna. However, putting it up did give me the opportunity to try 30m as well as 20m. Propagation was good that morning: I ended up with 35 contacts, four of them SSB (for a change.), the rest CW.
I did run into one issue with the BuddiPole — the banana clips on the center feed and the coils have loosened over time. I noticed that SWR was way off after getting the antenna up to operating height and it turned out to be that the clip had popped out from the center feed. I taped it in place for the duration of the operation, but it seems to me there should be a better engineering solution to this.
While I do complain about the BuddiPole, it also has it good points. Tuning can take a while, but sometimes the result is worth it.
