After being back nearly 3 weeks from the annual family visit to North East, Scotland or more precisely Elgin I thought I’d share what I had gotten up to, If you follow me on Twitter you might have spotted the odd tweet with a photo or some 140 character post saying how I was enjoying yet another dram or a pint!

This wasn’t the sole purpose of the trip mums side of the family are all based up in Elgin and surrounding area, plus I’m actually a Scot although lived in England for 99.9% of my life so far, so I can only declare that by birth certificate these days!

During the day was spent day tripping and we did manage to cram quite a bit in visiting Glen Moray & Benromach distillery, Inverness & Fort George, Aberdeen, and Lossiemouth a couple of times for walks along the beach but care had to be taken as there was plenty of heavy showers!

Benromach Distrillery

As we were staying at my grandmothers there’s always a possibility of taking some radio gear and doing some operating the last couple of years this was using a 2m handheld radio which is usually hardly ever used due to lack of activity.
Aberdeen Harbour
This trip was slightly different though the shack had recently acquired a Yaesu FT-817ND, which is perfect size for travelling specially as I normally travel around on the train so with that and a quickly made nested dipole for 20 & 40m I was already to operate as 2M0SQL/P.

The antenna was setup in as an inverted V in gran’s back garden which seemed to work reasonably during the week I made a mixture of QSOs in both SSB & PSK although conditions did seem rather poor, it was a nice way to pass a sometime in the evenings.

What I did learn from the trip was that it would be nice to have antenna which covered a larger number of bands and since Dad (M3JFM) and myself have been looking at the possibility of picking up an MP-1 vertical, so keep an eye out to see what we’re using on future visits.