The club attended Shedfest 2026 at Sandown airport on 13/14 June.
We arrived early on the Friday to set up and managed to secured a corner pitch so we could keep M9OPD’s van on site and attach a 10M DX Commander mast to the roof.
A gazebo was erected with chairs and a table inside incase of inclement weather but there was no need to worry as the sun shone for both days.
The working conditions were a Yaesu FT-710 working from a 100A lithium phosphate battery. The antenna was a 66ft long wire in an inverted ‘L’ configuration starting at 10M and sloping down slightly to 6M at the far end. The endfed ‘random wire’ went into a Yaesu FC-40 remote tuner and would happily tune most band but would not tune on 40M so a vintage manual tuner was used for 40M. Events like these are not just about making contacts they are also about gaining knowledge and experience from fellow members and as soon as Trevor (M0TVR) arrived and was told of the situation he said make the wire 71ft and it should work on 40M. With a bit of ‘field day engineering’ we grafted an extra 5ft of wire to the antenna and sure enough the remote tuner would now match the antenna to about 1.5:1.
The event was well supported by club members with 12 visiting on Saturday and 8 on Sunday.
Various other island radio enthusiast popped in to have a chat and on Saturday morning the first visitor was the local RSGB rep Fred Dawson (G1HCM) who stayed for a while and chatted with member of the public. Several CB enthusiast also visited our stand.
Band conditions were fair but we discovered at the end of day one that we were getting a lot of radio interference from the working static engines that were on display at the event, field days are all about adapting to conditions so at various times we jumped from SSB to FT8.
In all we made 90 contacts over the weekend but the event was not about the number of contact it was more a social event and demonstration of what the club could offer and in that respect I believe it was a great success
