July/August 2000 NCJ

at the top of the mountain. The town hasa long history—dating back to around1474.There is a mountain spring, whichprobably was one of the reasons thisarea was first settled. Today the water isbottled.The hotel we selected is called Jack’sHotel. It has five stories, a flat-roof, notmany guests, an understanding proprietorand friendly hotel employees. Wefound out later that the water there alsocomes from the mountain spring. Thisresulted in considerable savings in ourdrinking water expenses, and this allowedus to put more Cypriot pounds tobetter use—pints of KEO beer.The hotel was not expensive and thearrangements included three meals aday. The RF path to the north was openand clear.Antennas, AntennasMany antennas were required for ourplanned operation. We put up slopingdipoles for 160, 80 and 40 meters and aDX-77 vertical. The highest degree ofheroism during this phase of setup wasdisplayed while accessing the private,undeveloped and overgrown propertyadjacent to the hotel. In shorts and shoesof questionable utility, we found ourmobility through the brush, with its stingingthistles, was considerably impaired.To us, who are more familiar with thepine trees at home, it seemed as thougheverything was stinging our feet, handsand other parts of the body.The locals warned us about snakes.We didn’t see any, but we did see biglizards—about 30 cm long and very fast.They might have been dangerous creatures,but none of us knew for sure. Beit as it may, the lizards we saw lookedwell fed—judging from their groundscrapingbellies.One difficult part of our antenna projectwas putting up the 2-element 10-, 15- and20-meter quad. This went painfully slowdue to the hot sun (it should be noted thatthe air temperature was ranging between38 and 40 C), the lack of suitable places totie down guys and the heavy hardware.During this operation Jack suffered ascrape on his head and several painfulscratches between his sandal straps andon the upper parts of his feet.Shortly after we finished setting upthose antennas, the second group—Juris,Vilnis, Girts and Dimitri, arrived withthe main transceivers, more antennas,and other odds and ends. We repairedan old GAP Voyager we had from aprevious expedition and put up a MosleyTA-33-M with a rotator.It was difficult to situate all the variousantennas. There was limited room onthe roof and access to the area downslopefrom the hotel was difficult.The roof of Jack’s Hotel provided a convenient location for setting upsome of our antennas.Our 2-element 10-, 15-, and 20-meterquad.Mostly due to Valery’s childhoodlearnedstone-throwing skills—the sloperlower ends were located a good distanceaway from the hotel. We did sufferfrom a chronic shortage of Dacron linethough; the local stores were sold out.The number of people actually neededas operators during the contest itself ispretty low. When you consider the needto put up antennas swiftly and the transportationof all the equipment to and fromthe airport, the large number of membersin our group was essential for the supportof an operation as big as ours.Setting Up the StationThe operating position was set up in arather small hotel room. The amplifierwas set up on the balcony.Our primary transceiver was Girt’sIC-775DSP. As he unpacked it he proudlysaid, “This box hears everything!” Ourhigh expectations quickly turned toanxiety when nothing was heard whenthe radio was switched on. After removingthe transceiver’s covers, we soondiscovered that a filter had been shakenout of its socket. Fixing the problem waseasy.We also ran into problems with ourIC-756 transceiver. It was completely“dead.” It turned out to be a similarmechanical problem—a transistor hadvibrated out of its mounting. Luckily thatwas all the equipment trouble we experienced.We agreed that we needed topack additional repair items on futureoperations. We were lucky this timearound…Our ACOM-2000A amplifier was “justthe ticket” for smooth operations. We putit out on the balcony and forgot it—remoteoperation. No need to give it beer.Just keep feeding it good Cypriot 240 V/50 Hz electricity. They use two types ofwall receptacles: 5A with three roundconnections, and 13A with three squareconnections—UK style.Surprisingly, there was no noticeablevoltage fluctuation, considering wherewe were. The ACOM-2000A linear ampshifts bands automatically; the coax doesnot have to be swapped around. Wealso had an IC-PW1 amp, but it does notswitch the antennas automatically. We5