I enjoyed /M working ever since I got my licence in ‘87, but it was difficult when I was working — too little time to stop, erect aerials, make contacts etc.

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When I was in Spain [EA5FJF] I could really have fun /M and this page shows the various steps that I took there to set myself up for happy mobile contacts.

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I bought a set of mobile whips [had to import them from the UK] and checked and adjusted them all to the SSB part of the band. I had a problem - my car had a large sun roof, and nowhere to locate an aerial mount in a central position. So I had to settle for a top-of-hatch mount.

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At first I only had an IC746 for mobile work, but found this extremely clumsy—and nowhere to locate it conveniently in the car, other than on a passenger seat. In December 2006, Father Christmas came early with an IC7000 which was an amazing mobile transceiver. Some of the whips still wouldn’t tune, so I bought the matching LDG7000 ATU.

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After several weeks of operating it became clear that a multiband mobile aerial would save the inconvenience of constantly getting out of the car and changing whips to see if another band was active—then getting out again to go back to the original whip when the new band proved to be dead.  After much consideration, I finally settled on a High Sierra Sidekick aerial which gave continuous coverage from 50 MHz to 3.5 MHz. This amazing aerial did ‘everything it said on the box’ and when I had cause to send an e-mail to the manufacturers, I got a reply within four hours! The addition of the Sidekick meant I no longer needed to use the LDG ATU.

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I found a number of locations which were suitable for /M operations, and had a series of QSL cards which I used, depending on where the QSO was made. You can see some of them below. At first I quite wrongly assumed that it would be best on top of a mountain, but subsequent trials suggested that being by the edge of the water was just as good - if not better.

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I really got the bug again after many years absence from the mobile scene. Most of my activity was on the twenty metre band, simply because of the poor radio conditions during the sun-spot minimum, but as conditions slowly improved I experimented with other bands as well.

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Now it's 2018 and the urge has returned! Check out the text below the Spanish QSL cards!