Asiatic Russia with 20W and an indoor antenna

This is the video of a QSO with Asiatic Russian station RK9DM using my battery operated FT-897D and an indoor wire antenna.

It seems that the tuner is working fine.

Luxembourg: No. 23 as Portable and 70 overall

I have just received an eQSL from LX1EA, which is the first QSO confirmed by eQSL with this country. This means the country no. 23 confirmed as EC1CW/P and no. 70 overall.
I was using my FT-897D on the 17m band with a 3m-long indoor wire antenna from an appartment near the city of A Coruña, with a power of 20W on the interal batteries.

EA1 Summits

I have prepared a list of EA1 summits. The EA1 area comprised 16 provinces in the North West of Spain. You can see the list here.
In order to give similar chances to all the provinces, I have selected the summits that are one standard deviation above the respective province's summits mean height above sea level.
I have also assigned a number of points to each summit by dividing them into six bands accoding to a prominence index based on the summits' difference in standard deviations with their respective province's mean summit. Scores range from one point for 1-1.5 standard deviations and 10 points for 3.5 standard devisations and above.
The ideal would be to join some similar international programmes. It will be neccessary to appoint people for a number of functions, especially regional managers to promote the programme in their respective provinces.

Close-up pictures of the FT-987 whip mount

Here you can see a close-up picture of the FT-897 whip mount that I have installed, using a Hustler quick disconnect and some plastic isolators. It is connected in parallel with the tuner's so239 antenna connector.
The other SO239 connector by the whip mount is for VHF/UHF and is not yet connected to the radio.
I am also thinking about the possibility of preparing a 4:1 impedance adaptor for the whip mount only that would be connected with a smal jumper. What do you think? Does it pay?

Testing the FT-897

Today I have been testing the FT-897 in several configurations. The best results were with a wire antenna. I tried it on 17-, 20- and 40-meters.
Then I made a new whip antenna base and tried it without much success. It tunes ok, but its performance is much reduced compared to the longer wire.