After the fun of last weekend of constructing a few yagis vk2fsje and I thought it was only logical to put them to the test. We decided through the week that the Saturday morning would be the best time for the test. The test location would be a nice spot I had found at Mt Ovens (more precisely the Stony Rd trig point) which according to the trusty GPS is about 1310m above sea level. There is a rather large tower there that appears to be a weather tower </me shrugs>.

One thing we both realised once there is that neither of us had brought a digital camera to photograph the testing. I took a few with the camera on the mobile, but as you can see they are not the highest quality :( Additionally since the temp was around 0C warm clothes were a God send, unfortunately I had to share my gloves since someone else, not mentioning names (but not hard to guess since it was only the two of us hehe) forgot his. We also did not have any electrical tape to secure the RG213 to the mast but we were inventive :).

We setup just near the tower initially, antenna on the "mast" which was occy strapped tp the nudgebar on my car.

This was working quite well but once the wind picked up we decided we needed something that could offer a higher "mounting" point for the mast to keep it steady. A nice stump was found only about 100m from original location. There was even a nicely fitting spot for the radio and mic :)  

Let the testing begin...

We found that the yagis were both very directional (something we wanted), especially with some of the marginal repeaters we accessed. Early on in the day there was quite a bit of chatting on the various repeaters - thanks to all those that got back to us for a chat :).

With the 6 element yagi we tried for repeaters between 146.625 and 147.250, the 4 element yagi we tested between 146.625 and 147.925 and were able to access the following repeaters. We had my ipaq recording most of the idents we got so that we could be precise with which repeaters we got.

146.650 VK2RDX - Mt Bindo (not a surprise lol) - Both 4 and 6

146.675 VK2RLH - Newbridge - Both 4 and 6

146.700 VK2RAO - Mt Canobolas - Both 4 and 6

146.725 VK2RAG - Gosford - Both 4 and 6

146.725 VK2RDD - Dubbo - Both 4 and 6

146.750 VK2RTM - Tamworth (just love the ident lol) - Both 4 and 6

146.775 VK2RYG - Young - Both 4 and 6

146.800 VK2RLE - Heathcote - Both 4 and 6

146.825 VK2RHR - High Range, Southern Highlands - Both 4 and 6

146.850 VK2RMP - Wollongong - Both 4 and 6

146.875 VK2RMB - Terry Hills - Both 4 and 6

146.950 VK1RGI - Mt Ginini - Both 4 and 6

147.000 VK2RWI - Dural - Both 4 and 6

147.025 VK2ROT - Paddington - Both 4 and 6

147.050 VK2RBM - Lawson - only on 6 which we thought was a bit strange

147.100 VK2RWM - Grenfell  - Both 4 and 6

147.225 VK2RYL - Rylstone  - Both 4 and 6

147.250 VK2RNS - Asquith  - Both 4 and 6

147.325 VK2RTS - Lawson - Only tested on 4 element

147.925 VK2RGN - Goulburn - Only tested on 4 element

We also picked up repeaters but got no idents on the following frequencies

146.925 - pointing N, very small beam window

146.975 - pointing SSE, again very small beam window and this was only with 6 element.

147.175 - pointing E

We will have to have another "test" at some stage in the near future. Now we have a bit of a list of other things we should have taken (warmer clothes for one - there was still a fair bit of snow about when we left at lunch time).