Jeff VK4BOF Gary VK4FD Chris VK4YCG John VK4TL running the TREC Memorial net on 3.588 on Thursday night View taken from across the highway. You can get a good idea of the layout and the top hat for the antenna. AND showing the “K”line Click on images to enlarge Hi everyone, Well, for the first time ever, VK4XQA was activated recently by members of TREC. This was a mini - DXpedition to a place called Euramo which is noted by hams and everyone else in the area for just one thing, the brand new 60M high AM broadcast band antenna that has recently been installed there by Coastal Broadcasters, the owners of Innisfail’s AM broadcast band radio station 4KZ. One of our club members is Al Kirton who happens to be the manager of radio station 4KZ and he graciously gave us permission to go onsite at Euramo and use this beautiful new antenna system on the ham bands, specifically 160 / 80M. Well, he didn’t have to ask us twice! We organised some bodies, some accommodations and food, some generators and fuel and for good measure we advertised the up and coming operation in all the right places. As a result, Gary VK4FD, Jeff VK4BOF, John VK4TL and Chris VK4YCG headed from their homes to congregate at the base of the Euramo tower. We took with us, three Elecraft K3 transceivers, 1 Elecraft P3 Panadaptor and 2 Elecraft KPA500 Amplifiers and a lot of high hopes for success. As it turns out we had picked one of the worst weekends for lower band HF propagation that had been experienced for some time but that did not stop us, we still made about 60 contacts on various bands but the first one was the sweetest, our first contact on 160M was very fittingly Ron VK4EMF, the man that almost singlehandedly organised the permanent exhibition of Marcus Brims (XQA) spark gap transmitter at Mareeba's Heritage Museum, effectively bringing the gear back to its home town of Mareeba. (For more information of Mr Marcus Brims and his experimental radio station XQA, please look at other pages of our website.) Still, in spite of the low number of contacts, a lot was learned by all of us 160M newbies and we are itching to go back to the site to have another go, hopefully with better propagation this time. Here are a few photos of our setup and operators, just to give you an idea of what we did.