Some pictures of the 1979 VHF FD effort at Beltana, North Canterbury. We won that year using ZL3FJ callsign. The team was myself ZL3FJ, Rod then ZL3TAL now ZL3NW, Roger ZL3THQ now ZL3RC and Neville ZL3OJ. Pictures taken by Roger who had a camera!
The points that year were total 9018, made up of 6 metres 162 points. 2 metres were 1652 points. 70 cm were 2325 points along with 1296 nil (no gear) and 1300 up was 4879 points. So over half the total points came from microwave contacts!
The gear on the 6 metre band was an IC502 with 3 watts and a dipole, the 2 metre band with 10 watts from an IC211 along with separate north / south 10 element yagis! On 70 cm 25 watts from a homebrew ZL3THQ transverter to rotatable yagi! With the higher bands 3.3 GHz was 100 mW from CV237 klystron based wideband polaplexer gear ZL3TAL and 3 foot dish, 5.7 GHz with 1 watt from klystron based ZL3TAL transceiver with 20 db horns and with 10 GHz a 15 mW gunnplexer and waveguide feed to 3 foot dish. All microwave contacts were to the south toZL3HB on Mt Herbert. 73 Dave ZL3FJ
Dave ZL3FJ testing one end of three microwave links using Rod ZL3NW (ex ZL3TAL) 3 and 5 GHz gear and a 10 GHz Gunn setup of mine.
Dave ZL3FJ - then ZL3TBU