I’ve been neglectful of 2 things this year… 2m radio, and this blog.
I’ve had a pretty good couple of months on the radio since my last post. I’ve had very little interest in 2m radio. Perhaps if I were in a club, I’d be a little more interested, but right now it’s all about the HF!!! I’ve made a lot of HF contacts, concentrating on phone operations mostly, going digital only a couple of times. I’ve tried a couple of new antennas other than the 20m wire dipole that I started with… an 80m off center fed dipole (OCFD) and a 1/4 wave 20m telescoping antenna (this is the one that Salty Walt lovingly calls the “red slug”).
The OCFD that I’m using is something that my son let me borrow. He made it a couple of years ago. It’s about 135′ long, with a 90′ leg and a 45′ leg, being fed by a 4:1 balun. It was a bit of a challenge to get it strung up. Unlike my 20m dipole, where I could just throw some rope over some limbs and pull it tight on either end, this one is so long, and heavy that it has to be supported in the middle also, so that it doesn’t droop too badly. I have a lot of trees, but finding the right ones, and getting them all high enough took some effort.
The 1/4 wave 20m telescoping antenna was a cheap purchase from Amazon at around $40. It comes with a length of ribbon cable, terminated with a crimped on eye. The ribbon cable looks like some leftover wire from a printer manufacturer, very small and thin. You have to separate all of the strands yourself. I still don’t fully understand all of the physics of counterpoises and radials, but those thin little wires just don’t LOOK substantial enough to do any good, so I made 4 new radials out of speaker wire to be used instead. I don’t know if it works any better, but it looks better, and it makes me FEEL like it works better. I’ve also recently purchased a small LIFEPo4 battery, and plan to try my hand at some POTA activations, and this will be the antenna that I start with. Its super simple to deploy, and breaks down pretty small. I’ve tried out my setup a few times now, and I can have my rig up and operational in about 10 minutes, and its only a few minutes longer to break down.
A few weeks ago, there was a European CQ contest aimed at North America. I made 80+ contacts that weekend, with all of them being outside of North America, as far away as eastern Russia. The first day of the contest, I made about 20 contacts off of the 80m OCFD, and the rest on the second day using the 20m telescoping antenna. This past weekend, there was another contest called the CQ World Wide WPX contest. This was my first time participating in a contest where I submitted a log. I made another 83 contacts, with 48 of those being outside of the USA. One day I used the OCFD and the second day I used the 20m telescoping. I’m having a lot of trouble deciding which antenna really performs better.
So far I have just shy of 800 total logged contacts. Almost half of those are POTA. Besides being fun, POTA has really turned out to be a great learning tool for me. Instead of just turning the dial until I find someone, I can see where the activators are at on the POTA website, and tune right to them. Since activators are operating portable, it’s really helped me to begin to understand how far a signal can reach with different set-ups. It’s one thing to be at home with your giant 20′ beam on a rotator, pumping 1500 watts, and it’s another thing entirely to have less than 100 watts, with a battery, and a wire antenna, ham stick, or some other sort of compromised portable antenna stuck in the ground. So far, I like the challenge. I have plenty of parks within 20 minutes of me that can be activating, and hope to try my first one soon.
Finally, since my last post, I purchased a handheld log periodic antenna for working satellites. Satellites are an entirely different ball of wax. One of the things that got me interested in radios as an adult was trying to receive SSTV signals from the ISS with my youngest son. Using a phone app, a UV-5R and a CB antenna, I was able to catch some rough images. I’ve posted about this before. Until I discovered SSTV on the ISS, and started doing some research, I had no idea that there were also satellites with amateur repeaters on them. So far, I’ve been able to pick up a couple of other satellites besides the ISS. Just this afternoon, I was trying to hit SaudiSat. I can hear them very well, but I don’t have the knack of being able to talk on them yet. I’m pretty sure doppler shift, as well as being drowned out by other radios operating at much higher power levels than my UV5R Mini is what’s hindering me at the moment. But, I’ll get it figured out.
Next time, I’ll tell y’all about my trip to Orlando for Hamcation. Spoiler alert, it was ok… and it was way better than the Stone Mountain Hamfest, but it still wasn’t everything that I was expecting. Maybe I’m expecting too much? Or, maybe the fact that Orlando is an absolute nightmare just put me in a bad mood?
73 y’all!