Thoughts and Articles

CQ-DL April 2003

CQ – DL April 2003 Article about my Radio Activities from Sweden

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Article Summary

I was surprised to hear that my picture appeared on CQ-DL April 2003 edition’s front cover. It was SM0JHF who has written a writeup about my Swedish ham radio activities.

Article Highlights

Kamal Edirisinghe
4S7AB / KA5MAL

Author Sep 2003

Having More than 35 years of experience in the Field of Amateur Radio, I have published many articles in prestigious international publications like, QST, CQ-DL, NCJ, Six-News etc.. Here in this web site, these write-ups are intended to give you knowledge about my designs and projects related to the hobby. The articles about foreign HAM activities are intended to share my experience.

CQ-DL article about #4s7ab

The English translation of the German Article is below ;

I believe that if we want to work more DX, we have to help hams and prospective hams in those countries that are not so well represented on our bands. So when I got a message from Sri Lanka that an amateur radio operator named Kamal was coming to Sweden for a period of training in electronics and computers, I urged him to contact me while in Sweden. And so he did. I took him a couple of times to a club station from here he could talk to his friends both at home and those living in other countries. When the Islands On The Air contest was approaching, Kamal 4S7AB, said he would like to go to some island for this event.He likes a few contests and one of them is the IOTA event. I could only offer him going to a small but very mystique island south of Stockholm. The island, called Muskö, IOTA EU 084, has a submarine base carved inside the rock, invisible from the air and even the entrance to the base is through an underwater passage. The island has a road connection with the main land through a few kilometer long tunnel under the sea. So Kamal was of course very excited – they don’t have such things in Sri Lanka.

We put a simple random wire antenna, connected it through an automatic antenna tuner to my ICOM 746 transceiver. I had a couple of 12V car batteries but one of them was too old to give the 20A required by the transceiver. Luckily the other one was in better shape and Kamal managed to make exactly 222 QSO’s before the battery went dead.

Kamal is well educated and by now, a well experienced ham. He is almost 30 years old and has been licenced for more than 10 years. I can’t say that I helped him to be a better ham but I certainly encouraged him to carry on with our hobby showing that not all hams are only interested in a short QSO on the air and getting a QSL card. Also, we can be friends and help each other when we meet in person. After all, a radio contact is a substitute for a personal one, at least to me.

Kamal is quite often on the air and has an excellent web page at http://www.qsl.net/4s7ab  Take a look at it.

– Henryk Kotowski SM0JHF