I was back to Coochiemudlo Island today and was QRV on 40m, 20m and 15m from, but conditions were rather poor. On top of that, I had some local QRM all the time on all the bands, but couldn’t easily identify what it was.

I was operating with 20w and a three-band linked vertical antenna. The 15 m band was nearly dead, just had a few JA stations in my log as well as few VK/ZL/JA stations on 40m. The rest was all on 20m.

I didn’t even try SSB as it was very, very windy on the island and I’m sure my audio would be badly affected.

Thanks to everyone who called and thanks for your patience with picking up my weak signal, that’s life with batteries 🙂

Today I made a day trip to Coochiemudlo Island (IOTA OC137) with my wife and daughter and I thought I’d take my portable radio setup with me and “see how it goes”.

Well, it went pretty good and I’ll definitely be back this weekend, weather permitting.

I operated form the park, just about 30m from the beach, but considering I used battery power I could only run low power (20watts).

I used Yaesu FT-891 with 4200mA/h LiFePO battery. The antenna was a 40/20/15 m linked dipole, set up as an inverted-v, hanging off a 7m long squid pole.

We stayed in the park for about two hours and I logged approximately 80 QSOs, mostly JA and UA0 stations, all 20m CW.

Coochiemudlo is a tiny island just off the coast of southeast Queensland, near Victoria Point in Brisbane. It belongs to the Queensland State (South Coast) South group – IOTA OC137.

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Below are a few photos of me operating and of the island itself as taken from the ferry.