I was chatting to Big Tam, a farmer friend whose place is situated at the edge of a large moorland area. The direction of the land available for beverages on a dxpedition weekend would be anything from SW to North, through SE. The moors are used for virtually nothing, except a few sheep. I have always told him if I win the lottery, his place would do me just fine. I have included a few photos of the expanse, and there are some great possibilities. He has an old caravan he would let me have for weekends at a reasonable price. While this is not really ideal, ie latitude wise, and wouldn't expect results like Sheigra, (Or Martin's), it is about 2 miles from my front door, and as a result if conditions were good, could be organised quickly on a Saturday afternoon. All I really need is to take the old shack gas fire, and run a power cable to the caravan, ideally sited up the hill a bit where the photo was taken, out the way of Tam's very noisy farm dogs. It is also away from the overhead powerline feed for the farm. The main interest for me would be perhaps three fold;

1) The chance to try a much longer antenna than is possible at home, say 2000m. I would need a lot more cable for this though (Obviously !!!).

2) The option of an antenna running due North and even the NE direction may have an interest.

3) The open country means an antenna can be perfectly straight, not like the home version where I have 500m through a dense wood.

The image below consists of three images stiched a little roughly, but mind you some of the NASA martian surface images are not perfect. To the right of the farm, there is only marsh. It looks perhaps a little like buildings, but really is only water lying. The Darvel television tower is seen on the right of the image. I seem to recall in the 80s walking up the hillside with a portable radio, listening to Sunshine 531 from Dublin but seemingly having trouble with some kind of timebase interference, and my assumption was that the mast was generating this QRN. However during a recent walk, complete with portable there was no sign of ANY of the QRN! Obviously (sadly) there was no sign of Sunshine 531 either!! Had I imagined the problem some 20 years ago, or did Tam have an old extremely noisy valve TV??
So will I eventually go ahead and try a dxpedition up the road away from the relative comfort of my own shack? Who knows? The idea sounds good, and I have at least another couple of enthusiasts who are interested enough to assist in a venture such as this. Ideally if there was any way of lashing up a permanent antenna..........

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