Conditions have been poor and the weather has been terrible, but I reached a small milestone: I completed a moonbounce QSO with my 100th unique station (initial), and have since gone on to work a couple more. I’m happy with that, given my ridiculously small antenna and the fact that I’m limited to moon-rise only. The low height of the antenna above ground (approximately 6 or 7m) results in only two usable ground-gain peaks (around 2.5 and 12 degrees elevation), so my windows of opportunity for EME are indeed very limited!

I’m sure there are people with similar systems to mine that have never considered EME, perhaps thinking their antenna is too small. Please do give it a go! As an incentive, here’s a few statistics from my 102 unique EME stations:

• Number of EME DXCC: 34 (15 are unique to EME)
• Number of EME Squares: 88
• Number of EME Fields: 22
• EME best dx: ZL3TY, RE57OM, 18956km

I’ve also heard quite a lot more stations that I’ve not yet worked, including a better ODX, so there could be more to come…

I arbitrarily chose the 100th initial as a target to reach before making any changes to the system. Now that’s done I can think about what to do – current plans are to add 70cms, and perhaps add elevation and/or a second 2m antenna.