Cloud Warmer

My 2012 ARRL International DX Contest Results

2012-02-21T09:19:00.000-06:00

Indeed, the 2012 DX contest was fun. 48 hours of it, well, no, I still require sleep and since I'd chosen to work Single Band and that band was 40 meters, the days were free. The band closed here about 7 AM and refused to open until a few minutes after 5 PM, despite my best efforts.

I'd say the only drawback of the contest, for the DX side, is that as DX I can't take advantage of all the other DX on the air during the day in order to carve some notches toward my second DXCC award. I'll have to wait for the May WPX for the next good harvest.

About 14 hours of on-air time during the weekend is my guess, which gave me a good average Q rate of over 40, though at times it was as high as 65 Qs/hour. The biggest dry spell was the last session on Sunday, when I only worked 23 stations (not counting dups) during the final 50 minutes.

Some random observations:

What is up with all the jamming? Maybe half a dozen times either an SSB'r would start howling or making other strange noises for half an hour or more, or someone would put their key down, which sounded like they were tuning up, but for 30 minutes?
Worse than the jamming, which I could filter out, were big guns who couldn't hear me and decided the frequency was clear and started belting out CQ TEST right on top of me. In some of those cases I just had to relinquish the frequency, no way around it.
Don't work, at least as a runner, when you are tired and the calls start to run together. I did that Saturday night because I was so close to my personal goal of 500 Qs that I didn't want to stop. I was having to ask for more fills than usual and was mistaking N for K even. Really, it got pretty pathetic.
Utilizing some "advanced" N1MM Logger macro features really helped move things faster, such as using the in-line speed-up tokens for "CQ TEST" and "599".
Using CQ Repeat in N1MM Logger is a two-edged sword. It's great to have your CQ going out hands-free, but inevitably I'd forget to switch it off and walk over the other op when they answered.
The first day you don't see it, but by the second you start getting Dup-itis. I simply work them again, it's just as fast as telling them they've DUP'd me. Only one op dup'd me more than once, in fact 3 times, which makes me suspicious that it was intentional.
U.S. station call sign zones are not well correlated to the actual State they are in (due to the vanity system I guess), but Canadian ones always were. A corollary to that is that I noticed many U.S. stations gave me a State code that did not match up with their FCC address as reported in QRZ.com. Does the contest tabulator check this when matching exchanges?

Overall, I worked 608 stations with a multiplier of 53, not bad considering I stuck only to 40 meters and that this was my first real contest. Once I'd gone well over 500 Qs I realized I could make a new goal of hitting 100,000 points, but it was not to be. I ended up with 96,672. I'm about to submit the log after I get one question answered by the ARRL about which mailing address should I use in the log (or does it really matter?), my Stateside FCC address or the one here in C.R.

I'm looking forward to the next DX contest and plan to spend even more time with RufzXP to improve my call sign copy, though I'm sure it will never be as good as the true DX'rs.

Dah-dit-ditditdit-Dah

2012-02-18T14:41:00.001-06:00

So far in the ARRL DX contest I've made 222 QSOs, all on 40 meters. Besides some casual FISTS contests that I helped organize when my club, K7FFF, was active, I've never been an "insider" to a contest like this. In the past I would have simply used a DX contest to add to my DXCC score by Search & Pounce. I thought that it might be very similar to running a pile-up, but really it's not. The competition for band space and contacts is fierce, so when pile-ups do occur they are shallow and short-lived. I feel like I'm working for every QSO.

As I noted in my previous posting, I decided to work just a single band/low power, which makes life simpler, and also gives me a shot at winning that category for TI (in my dreams!). I have seen TI5N and TI5W on the DX cluster and though I haven't listened to them I can imagine that Keko is in the High Power category (and probably running 100+ Qs/hour). TI5W has been jumping around all the bands. So, maybe I have a shot in my category.

The downside to my plan, of course, is that 40M is not a great daytime choice and in fact the band dried up completely for me around 7 AM. I have a little regret that I didn't stay on longer last night, which I will do this coming evening.

Now, around 8 AM local time I'm typing this at the mechanic's while he replaces a bad radiator fan, taking a long break from the 'test. In order to reach my goal of 500 Qs I'm going to have to work about 300 more plus a little to provide some cushion for busted calls. I still think that is quite possible, though my Q rate is not as high as I'd hoped. It's just a matter of grinding it out.

Continuing to improve my call sign copy is going to help me a great deal for the next 'test as I'm still having trouble getting the calls on the first try. I imagine it can be a little frustrating for the calling op when I have to ask for fills, but maybe it's not as bad as I think. One thing that also had thrown me off a little was the realization that, thanks to the U.S. vanity call program, there is now a low correlation between an op's call number and their actual QTH. You can't assume at all what the State exchange is going to be. For Canadian ops it has, so far, been 100% correlation and in fact N1MM Logger always fills in the province automatically. Maybe a Canadian amateur (Mike?) can bring me up to speed about why that is.

I'll be testing the band condx off and on during the day, but my expectations are low. In any case, I'll be back at it full bore by 4PM when I expect 40 meters to open up again for my humble signal. Until then, it's a beautiful day here in Costa Rica, sun shining, birds singing, a nice cool breeze. Cul es gl in the 'test! 73.

Questions for the Experienced Contesters Out There

2012-02-17T14:30:00.004-06:00

I really don't know what to expect when I get on the air for the ARRL International today. Will it be about the same as the usual pile-up here or even more intense?

From what I've gleaned off the 'net it seems that working split during a 'test is frowned upon. Working simplex means my ears have to be sharper, however. I wonder if working split would be so bad if I were to, say, stay above 7.100 where (I think) the crowd of other participants may be thinner?

Since I will only be working the U.S. and Canada, is it appropriate to "call by the numbers" if the pile-up is too deep? And, if so, how do I do that exactly? For instance, does sending "CQ TEST W4" mean I only want 4-land stations or is it more restrictive (literally only stations whose calls start with "W4")? I know many ops will ignore my attempt to divide the crowd anyway, but it might help thin the callers a bit, especially if I only respond to 4-landers.

Any other operating tips would be very much appreciated. I just finished reading the DX Code of Conduct and though I knew most of it already it has given me a little more backbone to be more disciplined about my sending pattern, e.g., always sending my CQ before each QSO in order to keep a steady rhythm. I always send my 73 TU at the end, but sometimes I have been taking the callers immediately after I finish that rather than starting my station CQ/ID again. No more.

One Year Ago Today ...

2012-02-16T12:30:00.000-06:00

... was my first post to this blog, Cloud Warmer. I re-read that first post and I think the vague "mission statement" there is still true a year later, except that, 115 postings later, I've posted much more often than the once a month I predicted back then. I guess I was underestimating my passion for sharing my hobby and also the very rewarding response I've received from my modest, but increasing readership. I really, really appreciate all of you who come to view my little corner of the ham world, and all of your comments and suggestions. The new acquaintances I've made with fellow ham radio bloggers are especially valued.

All that said, I don't have significant news today. I haven't even been on the air for the past couple of days. I did replace the coax feedline on my big loop down at the other station with 300 ohm window line and, wow!, what a big difference that made on receive. It is now the equal of the doublet. There must have been a lot more loss over that short run of cheap-o coax that I hadn't realized. Thoughts of taking it down in favor of another doublet with a different orientation have vanished. It stays.

I'm seriously considering entering the ARRL CW contest this weekend, not to compete, but as an opportunity to put in some long sessions as a runner with a tentative goal of 500 QSOs for the weekend, which I figure is about 10 hours solid at the rig over those 48 hours. Certainly not very ambitious but definitely a step up for me and it will be fun handing out 1500 points. If I do get on, look for me on 40 meters to which I plan to stick exclusively no matter the time of day. Even during daylight hours I should be able to reach the southern U.S. if anyone is on the band.

I am anxiously awaiting a long-ago purchased used Core 2 Duo laptop to arrive from the States and I think it should be here any time now (it's part of a bulk shipment, which is why it's taking so long). I will replace this slower desktop PC with that laptop, which will give me some more processing power and more desk space. In that shipment is also a special layout Qwerty/Dvorak keyboard, which I hope will help me learn Dvorak, a goal I've put off for far too long. Also in that box is a K1EL USB Winkey, which will help N1MM Logger and me switch between the two rigs at the house station more easily. So, soon it will be Ham Christmas!

Once again, thank you to every visitor to my blog and I hope I can continue the entertainment for years to come. I look forward to your comments and especially to seeing you on the air! vy 73!

More HF Dabbling

2012-02-12T18:12:00.003-06:00

Saturday morning I awoke a bit after 5 AM and thought I'd test (once sufficiently coffee'd up!) whether I could reach Japan well on 40 meters at that time of day while it is still dark here. It seemed to me that a Saturday mid-evening in JA-land would find plenty of ops.

I flipped on the Argo V and immediately heard the distinctive sound of RTTY, which reminded me that WA3FRP had told me there was a contest this weekend. OK, what the heck I thought, why not give that a whirl instead. The JAs can wait until next Saturday. I had no illusions of competing, but it seemed like it would be fun handing out a semi-rare prefix for the real contestors.

After nearly an hour of figuring out the rules and horsing around with Fldigi I started running (S&P made no sense to me) on 15 meters where it looked like there was some action. I started out with 5W, no takers. I increased to 15W on the Argo, and got a couple of takers, but it was slow going. Eventually I switched to the K2 and ran 40W and things started clicking a little better (well, maybe literally clicking on their end). Nothing like running CW, though, that's for sure. It took 10 or 20 CQs to get an answer on average and decode was choppy.

I gave it up until early afternoon when I switched to 20 meters. There I got to experience my first digi-mode pile-up, which is pretty much the same cacophony as a CW pile-up except it's visual instead of aural. Lots and lots of garbage and then somehow a call sign pops out in the clear.

In the end I only handed out 35 QSOs and that'll keep me RTTY-wise for some time. I'm completely sure this contest would have been far more interesting for me if I was listening to the clackety-clack of vintage equipment such as that owned by WA3FRP, but on Fldigi it was less exciting to me than even PSK.

That rock looks a lot like the rock next to our property in CR

The rest of yesterday and today was spent mostly on CW. I managed to work 5N7M, but just missed Angola, and a lot of Stateside ops of course and today Honduras (hard to believe but that country was not in my log before). Running on 15 meters today I ran out of ops after working only about 26. That was a nice bite-size session.

My QSOs in Graphics

2012-02-11T05:46:00.002-06:00

For what it's worth, I tried making my own charts from the log data that I have in electronic format after getting inspiration from PH0TO. I'd never learned how to do a pivot chart in Excel before and it took a bit to suss that one out. It's really quite easy once you know the one trick of dragging the headings from the filter list to both the legend and data boxes. After I figured that out it was a snap.

First, though, I had to figure out how to convert an ADIF to an Excel sheet. I used DL1HW's macro-ized Excel sheet which you can download here.

I think 99% of my QSOs this year made it into a logging program, so that's good, though

the data sample is still small.

Both 2012 charts are skewed by that one run of 116 CW QSOs I did on 15 meters a couple of days ago. Looking at the modes chart it surprised me that I have exactly twice as many JT65 QSOs as all other digital modes combined.

I don't think I logged everything on the PC until about mid-way through 2011, so the data for that year are probably skewed as well, at least incomplete, but it provides a sketch of my activity. I didn't start using digital modes until late 2011, which is why there are so few QSOs for those represented. For this chart I combined both mode and band. 30 meters CW is clearly the overwhelming preference.

To date, I've never consciously targeted specific bands or tried to fill DX band charts, so for me these charts are like looking into a reflecting pool in a world where mirrors didn't exist. Oh, is that what I look like?!

New eQSL feature? You heard about it here first!

2012-02-10T14:16:00.001-06:00

After seeing Paul's QSO graphs (ex-PC4T, now PH0TO) on his blog it struck me that these kinds of charts derived from one's logs would be the cat's pajamas for hams who wonder what they are really doing on the air, hi! So, I dashed off a quick note to the eQSL support staff (see below) urging them to consider adding such a feature as a perk for their higher membership levels. Meanwhile, I guess I'll look around to see if there is some freeware that does this or else wrestle with Excel to get it done myself on my own log. BTW, the eQSL staff was pretty quick with a reply that they would pass on the suggestion to the "webmaster" whoever that is.  73!

Seems obvious to me now that I have seen this:
http://dutchhamradio.blogspot.com/2012/02/new-call-sign.html?showComment=1328895769976#c1478447869893084236

on another op's blog. You should offer an online program to let users (at Bronze level or higher perhaps) view their logs in graphical form so they can see what modes/bands/?? they are using the most or least. This might be a better feature for Silver since I don't really see much difference between the levels and thus have not upgraded to Silver, but might for this kind of feature.

73!

Poking around the modes

2012-02-10T11:14:00.002-06:00

The day before yesterday I was on CW only. Had a ragchew in the morning with my ham friend up at Lake Arenal and then later in the afternoon I sat down to work quick QSOs on CW (they start off slow, but once spotted it's DXpedition mode). I worked a total of 116 stations for that session in nearly 2 hours. Whew! That is my biggest daily total by far, ever.

I again sat down to do another CW session yesterday but as you can see in the log above I was interrupted. I suddenly had to go pick up Sean at school and didn't get back to the radio for a couple of hours thereafter. I decided then to forego pile-up mode and work some laid-back digi-modes instead and to exercise the Argonaut V instead of the K2.

That RTTY was my very first QSO with that mode believe it or not. WA3FRP has been using that mode since '67 and still uses vintage equipment.

He welcomed me to the mode and told me about a big RTTY contest this weekend. I'm not sure what a digi-mode contest is like. What happens to decode if there is a pile-up? :)

After that QSO I then tried calling CQ in Olivia 16/500. I always use a mode video ID when I call in anything other than PSK thinking that will make it easier for other ops to figure out the mode for these less-used types. I turn it off once contact is made. It took a while, but finally Pete from Alabama came back to me and Fldigi reported that we'd QSO'd before. I commented how nice his red collar looked in his QRZ photo, hi!

We had a long chat, but we both missed a lot of each others' transmission due to decode problems. I thought Olivia was designed to prevent that. On my end it seemed that decode would get interrupted and thereafter no text would appear. I found a workaround, which is to toggle TX/RX and then it seemed Fldigi reset its decode and all was well.

I finished up the evening with a couple of JT65 QSOs. I tried and failed to snag both a Venezuelan and a Russian station. Even though they were only at about -10 dB they couldn't hear me apparently.

Today I'm not sure which way I'll go, fast lane CW or ambling in the digital grass, but either way I'm sure it will be interesting.

DXtra Effort

2012-02-08T21:11:00.001-06:00

Despite all the tree trimming and removal done for the sake of the 200' doublet there was still one tree whose upper branch was bending down the support rope on one end. I'd managed to ignore it for the last couple of weeks however. After finishing my chores this morning I was determined to clear that last branch in order to get just a couple more feet in height on the wire (can anyone say obsession?). What should have been a simple task took a sweaty half an hour. That limb was just out of reach. But suffice it to say the deed was done. For no good reason I thought I should flip on the Scout and use that antenna after all that trouble, hi. Just in time, too, as HI3DX started calling CQ DX within 30 seconds. HI3DX is the Hotel India DX Club, main op being HI3B.

I'm only 40 watts on the Scout, but Dominican Republic is pretty darn close so how hard could it be? He was booming in 599+ here. Well, like that stubborn tree branch this "easy" QSO was a struggle. I figure either my signal was weak or the angle was wrong but he had a helluva time copying my call. He got TI2, but the rest eluded him until I'd repeated it maybe 20 times during several exchanges. I was starting to feel bad that I'd hooked him and was making him work so hard for a prefix he probably already had. Finally, it was in the log and I switched off the radio. This "test" didn't tell me a thing about the antenna, but it said volumes about the tenaciousness DXrs can exhibit. I'll make a point of being sure he gets a hard card in the mail.

Search and Destr... err, Pounce!

2012-02-07T19:37:00.000-06:00

CW activity today started at 10 AM on 40 meters when I had my usual, very irregular, sked with TI7/AA2UP. We chatted for nearly an hour then I was off the air until late afternoon. I wasn't quite up to being the DX today so got on the Argo V at 20W and called CQ, which provided some short chats with some Stateside ops. Later, I got back on again with the K2 to see what DX I could work.

In N1MM Logger I saw ZK2C on the DX cluster and clicked on the entry to bring the K2 to that spot on 15 meters. I was clueless about where that station was (New Zealand?), but work first ask questions later as others have said. Copy was pretty good from his end to mine, but given that they are running 500W to my 100W my signal probably wasn't the easiest to pick out of the pile-up. It took me well more than a dozen tries to snag them, but finally I got through. The trick was switching from the vertical to the quad.

And so it went. I cherry-picked the strongest signals when I could, worked whatever when there were only weak ones. SV9MBH eluded me, just too much of a stretch for the vertical.

The last one of the evening was F2QJ, Guy, in France. He was DX-rag-chewing, and I tried to keep up the chat but we were 449/329, too laborious. This fellow has quite a tidy looking station. He looks like he would be a great op to chat with. I'm sure he has many radio tales to share.

My Personal DXpedition

2012-02-04T14:15:00.004-06:00

Getting on CW is getting better. RufzXP has greatly increased my ability to copy call signs faster (and type them in at the same time) and I'm starting to find a rhythm to handling the stream of calls. Still, there are acres of room for improvement, but perhaps practice will get me closer to perfection. Today on 17 meters the callers were a little thin and the signals were mostly not strong and I only had one non-U.S. QSO, but it was relaxing.

I'm using a few "tricks" to decrease the depth of the pile-ups, such as today by using 17 meters instead of 20 meters, which pretty much guarantees less traffic. Today I was even spotted on the DX clusters early, but still the pile-up never got more than 3 deep; most callers were in the clear. On a more populated band I can tell by the rapid increase in the number of hams calling me whether I just got DX-spotted.

Another trick is to lower the power. Using the TT 516 avoids any temptation I can get to go over 20W. I also try to engage the first caller in a ragchew if possible, because it may be the last one for the next hour or so. Digi-modes offer ragchewability without pile-ups of course, but I'm really enjoying getting back to my CW so my activity on those has declined quite a bit.

You get used to being popular I guess, even though TI is way, way down the Most Wanted list.

DX in the Neighborhood

2012-01-30T20:00:00.001-06:00

About 3 days ago when I was stretching the legs of the new long doublet for the first time, I gave it a whirl on CW. After working several European stations on 30 meters, I changed band modules in the Scout to work on 20 meters. I was planning on calling CQ to see what I could turn up, but as I swept the dial on 20 meters I ran into a pile-up on HK0NA. After two failed sends of my call I had a Duh moment when I realized I hadn't re-tuned the Matchbox for the new band. After a quick tune I got him on the next call with my 40 W from the 555. Nothing spectacular for sure. They are less than 500 miles from my QTH. But, satisfying just the same.

Today I spent a lot of time with the Scout setting it up for digital mode work by making a mic cable with an audio jack and lines for a PTT switch. I went old school and fabricated a foot pedal whose metal parts I wired directly. Works FB! I managed a few PSK31 QSOs, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia (a new one), etc. It was getting dark, so I headed back to the house.

Back to DXing. I'd been reading on others' blogs about VP6T, Pitcairn Island, so I brought up DX Summit, saw that they were on 15 meters where I have two antennas, so I wanted to see if I could snag them, too. I haven't seriously chased rare DX for a while, but I started to feel a familiar itch. Even though they are only about 4,000 miles from me, I thought I would even up things a bit by working them from the Ten Tec Argonaut V with 20W out.

This was work. The pile-up was big and spread over 3-4 KHz. Try as I might I couldn't figure out where he was listening. I tried various offsets for VFO B and switched between the vertical and the quad. I must have been dozing off after sending my call for the umpteenth time because it startled me a bit to hear the last few characters of my call jump out at me, followed by '?'. Somehow I didn't flub it and keyed out my call again, 599, etc. and that was that. They are in the log on that band. I need to do this more often! By the way, it was the quad that they worked.

200' Doublet - The Hook Up

2012-01-27T17:55:00.000-06:00

First things first. Before you drill holes and whack out expanded steel with your grinder, as I did, move your gear to a safe location. Or, if you're lazy like me, just use a drop cloth.

Once the drilling and cutting was done, I ran PVC pipe through the holes and inside that some 1/2" flexible tubing to center the wires and to provide some strain relief going in and out. I'm not grounding the feed line, but did insert a heavy duty cut-off switch on the outside wall.

Where the ladder line drapes under the eave before entering the shack I added a short standoff to keep it a foot or so from the metal frame of the fascia and to provide a bit of support for the 35 feet or so of line leading up to the antenna.

Inside the shack the ladder line goes directly to the Johnson Matchbox "Lite", with no intervening balun, and it seems to work fine. I haven't yet noticed any RF side-effects, but I haven't run more than 40 watts through it so far. The second tuner is a homebrew unit I obtained from G3VKM years ago. It is a simple L-C tuner that can also be configured in a serial arrangement. It's not quite up to that task of tuning random wires and doublets as the Johnson unit is, but it works well enough. I have it now hooked up to the 400' Loop. The tuners are required for the Ten Tec Scout since it has no ATU built-in (never did, never will).

An arrangement of coax switches brings the tuners' outputs to either the Scout or the currently in-repair K2. This allows me to A/B antennas for a single rig, and to A/B rigs for a single antenna. It's a bit awkward for the K2, however, since it has its own ATU, but its a workable configuration for now. The coax bypass switch in the upper right of the photo is not in use at the moment, by the way.

I made up a spreadsheet for easy reference to the manual tuner settings for both the Loop and the Doublet. I initially made it thinking I was going to only use the Matchbox, but the addition of the open-wire feeder made that impossible without adding some more external switching, which I think would be over-kill, so I brought out the G2VKM instead.

The Loop is pretty amenable to all HF bands hooked up direct, but the doublet looked a little hopeless on 30 through 80 meters at first. The Johnson brought down those high SWRs just fine, though. The highlighted entries are just notes that those particular bands could be handled direct if I had a bypass switch in the tuners or externally. Note that the G3VKM really doesn't help enough on the 30 meter band on the Loop, but it's not terrible.

Once it was all hooked up I did some A/B reception tests and the doublet is clearly louder by about an S-Unit over the Loop. The Loop, as loops should be, however, sometimes had the edge because of a better S/N ratio, but generally signals came through more readable on the doublet.

We went for a 3 day trip up to Lake Arenal right after I got this all connected, so I didn't get a chance to try out the doublet on TX until this afternoon. Though I didn't do any A/B QSOs with the two antennas, the doublet was performing very well into Europe today on 30 meters. I didn't give it enough time on 20 meters, only working a couple of Stateside stations on that band. It seems that it's going to be a satisfactory antenna and I'm really looking forward to giving it a more thorough shake-down when the K2 is back in operation. If it turns out that the Loop is only useful in a small number of QSOs then I may convert it to a second doublet with a different orientation than the new one, fed also with open line, of course!

200 Foot Doublet - Ladder Line

2012-01-22T22:15:00.001-06:00

After my last post there was still another day and a half of trimming trees to get a clear path for the doublet. I cut or trimmed at least twice what I thought I was going to when I started, at least 2-3 pick-up loads of trimmings. It was difficult work to say the least, running up and down rough terrain and tending to the hoists at each end of the antenna, which is about 100 meters long including the support ropes. Finally, Saturday, the rope and wire had a clear shot and I was able to pull it all the way up in the clear.

In the middle of that I took a break to start making the homebrew ladder-line with which I would feed the doublet.

As I'd mentioned in the previous posting, I'd ordered some Zareba (which I always remember as Zebra) fin insulators, a tip I'd picked up on an eHam page. These are small, lightweight, made from UV-stabilized polyethylene and just 10 cm long. Perfect. They come in packages of 50 for $4. I set up a quick jig on my drill press and made holes on each end 2 mm wider than the insulated 14 AWG solid conductor copper house wire I would use for the feed-line. Center to center the holes were 86 mm apart.

Next, I stretched out two 40 foot lengths of the wire and started sliding on about 45 of the insulators, figuring an approximately 10 inch spacing on the line. Once they were all on I stretched the wires and secured the other end. The fit was such that the insulators slid on easily but there was enough friction to hold them in position prior to fastening them down. I spaced them along the wire using a 10" stick as a gauge.

When the spacers were all in place I fired up the glue gun, setting the temperature higher than normal so the glue would be less viscous.

When I'd read about using these insulators for ladder-line I remembered the person gluing around the wire at the hole. But, it occurred to me that a better technique would be to send the glue in from each end of the tube. The tip of the glue gun was a perfect fit and one squeeze of the trigger just filled the hole with a little glue extruding from the wire hole. In this way, too, the tube is blocked for any small insects who might think of building a nest inside. I glued one entire side first then made small eyeball adjustments as necessary to make sure the spacers were straight as I glued each one from the other side.

Voilá, 40 feet of ladder-line done in about an hour and a half at a cost a little north of $10. I wasn't terribly concerned about the exact impedance as you might have guessed, but I did dust off a 1963 ARRL Handbook to see what the calculation would be for this spacing and wire size. Somewhere between '63 and my next most recent Handbook (circa 1990) this formula and chart seem to have been edited out. I'm sure brewing up your own open feed-line went out of vogue some time ago.

I used both the chart and the formula and I was puzzled at first why I was getting two different answers (480 ohms by formula vs. about 550 on the chart). Finally, I checked a different source (Wikipedia) and realized my lack of reading comprehension was at fault as I'd used the wire diameter (1.5 mm) instead of the radius. That error corrected I came up with 568 ohms Z, which corresponds nicely with the graph. I probably should have made an empirical measurement, at least for the exercise, but the wire is already up in the air now doing its duty as a low-loss carrier of radio energy under highly variable SWR conditions! The radio end is attached to the Johnson Matchbox. More about that in the next installment.

New Antenna - Doublet or Loop Extension?

2012-01-20T06:00:00.000-06:00

Even though my Twitter box says I've been QRT for several days, it lies. There have been a couple short stints on CW this week, but mainly I'm spending my radio time working on a new antenna. Nothing exotic this time, just a new doublet for my workshop station where my in-repair K2 and the Ten Tec Scout live.

I was also playing with an old Johnson Matchbox tuner and the AA-54 analyzer finding the correct settings for the 400 foot loop that is the only antenna down at that station these days.

I have gone back and forth several times in my mind whether to extend the loop with a new section that would raise the lower side of the loop about 20-30 feet or to put up a new long doublet that would be an average of about 70 feet above ground. I settled on the latter, and if later I want to absorb the doublet into the loop, most of the infrastructure work will have been done.

The line of the doublet hangs over a steep drop-off in terrain, probably about 100 feet at the deepest point. The choice of making the doublet 200 feet long was mostly a back of the envelope guess. I cut the wire to that length and Sean and I went to work placing the two pulleys, scrounging rope, and threading the wire through the "forest" of trees below the antenna line.

I later modeled that length, and even though I could go quite a bit longer (or shorter obviously) 4nec2 shows me that that length really is the best compromise for what i want to accomplish. In the plots below, due to the nearly E-W orientation of the wire, North is at the top and the strong lobes give me pretty good (theoretical) access overall to Europe, Australia, Japan, and South America, depending on the band. In the plots below the TO angle for 30M is 15 degrees, and 10 degrees for the plots of the higher bands.

As we pulled up the wire yesterday we had to do quite a bit of cutting of obstructing branches, sometimes whole trees (small ones, no more than 4 inches diamater), and we're still not quite done. I'll feed the antenna with homebrew open line for which I'd cached some plastic fence insulators some time ago for just such an occasion. The wire for the open line will be 14 gauge solid copper house wire. I haven't quite worked out how I'm going to interface the open line to the station, but I have several options to try there. Stay tuned (pun intended)!

Fixin' The Rigs

2012-01-19T09:22:00.000-06:00

Radio maintenance I consider to be a necessary evil in the hobby. That's because I rarely feel my electronics skills are a match to the job. That makes it all the more satisfying, however, when I am successful at it. It's not even a consideration (so far) to send one of my rigs to the shop due to the shipping costs, so with the help of the denizens of various on-line groups I tackle these jobs as best I can. Recently one of my K2s exhibited an identical symptom to what it had back in April - the encoder was frozen, no ability to change frequency. Back then it turned out one of the four wires to the encoder had a crack in it, so I figured it would be a simple re-soldering job again. The wires were fine, however, so it was necessary to do a lot of troubleshooting with the DMM to pin it down to a bad control board MCU. I probably won't see the new firmware parts for another 4 weeks so that rig is down for some time.

Not being able to use that K2 in the workshop made me pay attention to my old Ten-Tec Scout, which has band modules for 40, 30, and 20 meters. Though the rig works, the SWR/Wattmeter had been stuck since I acquired it used. As long as I was tearing apart radios I felt inclined to tackle that repair job, too. The Scout is harder to break into than the K2, so it was challenging to remove the meter, which is a pretty delicate part to put into my ten thumbs. Somehow, I managed to refurb it and get it back in (though not in one try) and it works well enough, though the power setting could use calibration. I'm now working on (by working on I mean intending to) make up a mic/PTT cable so that it will work with digi-modes in place of the ailing K2 at that operating position.

KX1 30 Meter Debut

2012-01-15T18:47:00.001-06:00

Except for one short run to town to pick up some steel for an upcoming project and groceries, I pretty much frittered away the day blogging, taking long coffee breaks, playing with the dogs, and finally enjoying some radio. The one radio "task" I was most likely to blow off was RufzXP, so I did that first! I spent an hour with it, but no new high score today, though my average scores and WPM are steady to slightly rising.

Around 4 PM I carried the KX1 up from the workshop and set up on the north balcony. My improvised "shack" was less than ideal. I could have used a short coax jumper of lighter gauge than the RG-8 to the vertical and a real table, but I made do for the hour I was on the air. Though I was QRP, I had no trouble making contacts as 30 meters was wide open with lots of signals. I tried being a good QRP'r by listening first, but my impatience got the best of me and I soon sought a slot from which to call CQ. I didn't call more than three times before I got my first reply and never more than twice thereafter.

I tried to stretch out the QSOs and was grateful I wasn't getting piled up on after each one ended (sometimes QRP has unexpected advantages). I also cranked back on the keying speed, partly because I didn't feel like pushing my copy limit and equally because the built-in KX1 paddles make my sending more error prone than usual. Each QSO was a gem, each about 10+/- minutes long, and at least two of them with other Elecraft rigs. The log is as follows:

W8FV, Pat in NC, 599/449, K3

AB0TO, Dave in MO, 559/329, ex-KX1 owner, on IC-746Pro

NF1O, Barry in NH, 579/579, K3

N7FF, Frank in AR, 579/589, ??

WK8A, John in MI, 589/559, ??

By the last QSO I was getting QRM from other ops trying to work me who couldn't hear WK8A apparently. I really didn't savor working a pile-up with the KX1 and the light was failing on the balcony, so it was time to call it quits. Altogether a very nice outing for the new KX1 30M module.

Hamming Mélange

2012-01-15T08:49:00.001-06:00

Just as Mike, VE3WDM, is succumbing to digi-mode fever, I'm going in the opposite direction, wanting to use CW more. Thus, is the ebb and flow within the hobby. I know ops who stick to basically one mode their entire life, but I couldn't find that satisfying personally with so much to explore. Not that I'll ever try (let alone be skilled at) even a small fraction of what is offered by ham radio.

Being Sunday I'm resisting the urge to continue with farm chores and spend time with the blogs and radio today. I hope to give my KX1's new 30 meter band module a QRP workout this afternoon/evening on the house vertical.

I'm also anxious to try 15 meters again as I replaced the WUPV vertical on the roof with a more aesthetically pleasing, more broad-banded, and lower SWR 1/2" copper pipe element. That element seems to have also brought down the SWR to tunable range on 20, 17, and 12 meters surprisingly enough. It's only about 6' tall, so clearly the 30 and 40 meter elements are picking up some of the load, and it's acting more like a tuning stub.

Despite a dip in my call sign copying practice with RufzXP during the holidays, I'm back on that horse again. Still, progress is slow, coming in bursts rather than incrementally, but it's not nearly the chore it started out to be. I work with it daily, often an hour or more. When my session scores begin to decline I allow the brain synapses their down time.

I worked with a couple of new-to-me digital modes lately, namely Throb and Contestia. K7BH and I ran through several Throb flavors (1, 2, 4, ThrobX4) and found them unsatisfying.

A ThrobX 4 signal

Could be us, could be Fldigi, but even when the trace was strong, decode was difficult. Throb seems to be sensitive to signal alignment and often many seconds would pass before decode began. Once you get decode it's good, but I'd rather use PSK than this mode again.

Contestia I like. Its decode is nearly 100% like Olivia, but the speed (for the same bandwidth) is faster. The first time out, however, the other op said I had an "echo" about 1 KHz below the main signal. I've not read that observation from other ops, however, so perhaps it was a one time only glitch. When my CW sked buddy gets his antenna back up we'll experiment with some of the other less used modes.

I was excited to take up Julian's, G4ILO, suggestion to join in on the Opera party to give the software a shakeout. I subscribed to the Opera Yahoo! Group to get a better idea of what it was all about. After reading how at least one op's PC got trashed by the software (which doesn't even have a proper uninstall facility), I'm not quite so ready to jump into the fray right now. When it appears to be more stable but not near "finished" I'll take another look, however. I'm also waiting for it to be 2-way as I find WSPR beaconing to be quite satisfactory in most regards.

Nearly Skunked - Jason Experiment II Result

2012-01-09T17:58:00.000-06:00

The picture at the left is my decode screen on Jason. Probably similar to what was seen by most who participated in the test. Indecipherable junk. Up until the final hour of the 40 meter test I'd thought the test was probably a complete washout.

Partly this result was my own blunder in preparation. Though I had tested Jason with Normal mode by running two instances of the program on one computer and letting them communicate via the sound card, I'd never actually done a radio-to-radio test with that mode. I just assumed that since Fast had worked, that Normal would too, albeit much slower. However, it was not to be.

During the first session, the 20 meter test, I was in communication with Ken, KB7H, via my QSO Twitter account, @TweetQSO. We weren't making any RF connection in either direction. I then noticed that the heat sink on the K2 was still cool to the touch whereas during the first Jason experiment it got quite warm.

I was also exchanging e-mails real-time with the software author, Alberto, I2PHD. He was just as puzzled as we were as to why it wasn't working. My sense of it was that even though I had a carrier it didn't seem to be modulating. Perhaps the 4 Hz width of Normal mode (vs. 35 Hz of Fast) doesn't allow enough difference in the tones to create modulation in the K2.
In any case, after the slow-motion fire drill of the 20 meter session I decided that for 40 meters I would revert to Fast mode and made last minute announcements here and on the Yahoo! Digitalradio group to that effect.

I didn't hear from Ken during that session, he must've gone QRT, but during the last half hour I did receive screenshots from both Alberto in Italy and Wayne Dailey, K1CF in New Hampshire that show we indeed did make contact (although I still received nothing). So, for whatever reason, Normal didn't work and I have only a slim hope for Slow mode.
I'll put off any further experimentation with those speeds (unless someone comes up with a good idea about how to get those to work). I know that this year Alberto has resolved to make a number of improvements to the program so it may behoove us to wait until those are done. One improvement I would really like is a beacon interval timer so that I don't have to manually start and stop the transmission.

Again, thanks to all who tried to TX or RX Jason during this last test. Sorry that it wasn't more successful. 73!

Jason Exp II modification - Fast mode

2012-01-07T11:24:00.001-06:00

Folks, very sorry for the last-minute/mid-experiment change, but it was pretty clear that Normal mode wasn't cutting it for some reason. So, I'm going to finish the experiment with Fast mode (no Turbo) from this point on. I've confirmed it radio-to-radio that this mode does work just like last time.

New Personal KM per Watt Record

2012-01-06T09:17:00.002-06:00

Friday morning I was WSPRing on 20 meters with 1 watt. Around 9 AM local I checked the map on WSPRNet and found I was heard in both Australia and Norway. The former is a 13,800 Km stretch, so that's the new record for me: 13,800 Km/watt. Not bad! And that's off the back of my quad (guess that says the F/B is not so good, hi). I've since reduced power to 500 mW to see if I can double my Km/W.

By the way, I used this page to calculate the distance: http://www.daftlogic.com/projects-google-maps-distance-calculator.htm It doesn't take grid locators, but I still think it is easier to use than the common QSO distance calculators around, which seem buggy and hard to use. YMMV (or should I say, YKmMV).

Jason Experiment II

2012-01-06T07:17:00.000-06:00

Saturday, Jan. 7th, I will try making Jason contacts using 20 and 40 meters. This time I will use Normal mode (no turbo), which means that the tones will be much longer and the transmission rate will be 2.5 characters per minute (0.5 WPM). The message will be:

CQ DE TI2/NA7U JASON NORMAL PSE K

That line will take nearly 15 minutes to transmit at Normal speed. I hope the slower speed will improve decode for listeners.

The schedule will be 15 minutes TX at the top and bottom of each hour followed by 15 minutes RX at xx15Z and xx45Z. I'll be watching for others' transmissions this time. Transmit power again will be 3 watts out.

Frequencies will be 14.074 KHz and 7.074 KHz (those are dial freqs), USB, centered on 800 Hz audio. I'll start TX/RX on 20 meters at 1600Z until 1800Z. TX/RX will begin again at 2200Z until 2400Z on 40 meters. That's 8 transmissions total.

On 20 meters the antenna will be my quad with a heading towards Europe. On 40 meters I will use the rooftop 1/4wl vertical.

Some tips when using Jason - keep in mind that the software is still a little unstable. You may get crashes. Also, my own experience is that the decode starts to degrade after about 15-20 minutes of RX (you'll see the tone traces get fuzzy). Sometimes the waterfall freezes. All of these are corrected by exiting and re-starting the program. I've made Alberto, I2PHD, aware of these problems.

A couple of "features" of the Jason program - it will only connect to whatever the default sound card is in your PC. Even though you'll see a COM port selection, this is only for use in sending data, not for PTT. You'll have to PTT some other way. I use Flrig to control the PTT on my K2.

Final note: I'll announce my TX segments on my TI2NA7U Twitter account, but don't reply there. I'll monitor any tweets during the TX/RX on a different account: @TweetQSO.

Happy Jason Hunting!

Preparing for Second Jason Experiment

2012-01-05T08:35:00.001-06:00

I just started WSPR on 17 meters with the quad pointed towards Europe. Usually I'm away from the radio during the morning hours doing chores around the finca. Radio time is often in the afternoon and evening. I don't know why, but I had it in my head that propagation from here is not so hot in the mornings. Perhaps that was the case before the current sunspot cycle really ramped up, but a quick glance at PSKReporter (and less so on WSPRNet), shows it just ain't so!

17 meters at 8:30 AM local on PSKReporter. 15M is even more dense.

Clearly there is a path open to Europe across the Atlantic and I mean to take advantage of it. I haven't yet heard or been heard by Europe on WSPR, but it's only been running 10 minutes and typically I'm swamped with U.S. signals.

My motivation is, if I'm convinced this early AM path exists from the Tropics, is to give my European ham brethern a better shot at receiving a Jason transmission this Saturday. So, we'll see how it goes and I think I can announce my Jason schedule by this afternoon or tomorrow, Friday. I intend to operate it on at least two bands and not necessarily at contiguous times. I'm certainly going to go easier on the K2 and limit my transmission times and also put the program on receive to see if 2-way communication is possible.

Fifteen on the Verticals

2012-01-03T15:31:00.001-06:00

You might recall that I tried to add 15 meters to my nest of verticals on the roof some time back. I first used some 1/2" copper water pipe cut for 15 meters. Not even close, the SWR was way high. I then switched that out with my WUPV homebrew vertical so that I had some control over the resonance with the tapped base coil. Recall that all three antennas, the 30M, 40M verticals and the WUPV are fed with a single coax line (via a 1:1 choke balun).

It was no dice with the WUPV either! I couldn't get an SWR below 9:1 no matter which tap I chose. I let that sleeping dog lie (lay?) for several weeks, but today decided to kick it awake. Up to this point I'd been using the analyzer directly on the 15M element via its SO-239. It showed nice behavior that way, but not at the other end of the feedline at the radio. Today, since I'd surmised that it was the interaction of the other two elements throwing things off, I de-wrapped the balun connection and connected the AA-54 to that.

Not only did I try matching 15M but also 17M or whatever I could by doing broad sweeps and moving the tap. It was like pushing a rope uphill. Finally I bypassed the base coil entirely and saw a decent dip, but too low in frequency. So, I pulled down the antenna and started snipping wire (actually, folding it back on itself). That finally did the trick and it only took a couple of adjustments. I still couldn't find a dip lower than 2.4:1, but that's close enough for me. Of course, 10 meters then worsened, 5:1 SWR, but with short fat coax going to the roof that translates to only a 20% loss and who needs that extra power on 10 anyway! HI.

Proof in the pudding and all that, I jumped on JT-65 to try it out. I am writing this in between transmissions. So far (with more credit to the band than me, of course) I've made one QSO after another without a break with decent dB reports, so it's working well. I feel I've filled the gap between 30M and 10M nicely with this addition to the vertical cluster.

Results of 1st Jason Experiment

2012-01-01T12:17:00.002-06:00

Happy New Year!

Thank you to everyone who tried to receive my first Jason transmission. I know it must have been a busy day preparing for New Year festivities (it was here), so I very much appreciate the efforts you made.

My signal on the waterfall of K3SOM's Flex5000

The experiment was successful, though I certainly couldn't say a roaring success. I received 2 and a half reception reports, from K3SOM (PA), K1CF (NH), and KD8OSM (MI). The latter saw my signal on DM780 (and said it was s9+) but couldn't decode it.

From K3SOM in Pennsylvania

From K1CF in New Hampshire

The screenshot from K1CF (with the lighthouse in the background) was especially interesting to me. There in bottom center (which I circled) was the name and call sign of my ham friend Ken Hunter who visited us earlier this year. I didn't know he was transmitting on Jason, too.

It was unlikely I would have received anyone else's transmissions since I didn't put the Jason connected to my K2 on Rx on the 30 minute off periods (next time!). I only monitored my own sig on the antenna-less TT 516.

I found a bug in the Jason software that may have inhibited reception for some. As I monitored my own signal I noticed that about 15 minutes into reception that the traces would get "fuzzy" and the decode was garbage. If I killed and re-started the RX Jason the signal cleared and decoding started fine again.

Also, occasionally the RX waterfall would freeze. Centering the signal was a little touchy sometimes as well. you have to click your mouse where you think the center of the signal is to get it within the yellow bars.

I'd like to continue doing some experiments with Jason and I'm open to suggestions. I think 30 meters was not the best choice for the time period I used as there appeared to be weak propagation to Europe until the penultimate or final transmissions. Next time I think it might work better to start about 2000Z on 20 meters and switch to 40 meters about sunset here. I'd also like to use Normal non-Turbo to increase the chance of decode (though it would be much slower). Perhaps a better TX sked would be 15 mins on/off with reception by me during the off periods.

Thanks again and 73!

Jason Beacon Saturday 1800z 10.131 MHz USB

2011-12-30T15:58:00.002-06:00

I found time today to do a little TX/RX experiment with the Jason program to see how it worked from both ends. I used the K2 as the transmitting station and the Ten Tec 516 (no antenna connected) as the receiver. Since the program doesn't have a way to both send audio and trigger PTT I use Flrig for the PTT. The audio comes from converting a text file that provides the beacon data, which is:

VVV DE TI2/NA7U JASON BEACON FAST MODE 73

It takes about 2 minutes to send/receive that one line.

One thing I learned from my experiment was that the waterfall window in the Jason program is small and narrow, which makes centering a signal difficult, especially if you are not sure for what you are looking.The two yellow bars have a distance fixed at just 1.5 times the bandwidth of the signal. The bandwidth is dependent on the signal speed. You must have the entire signal within the yellow bars to get a decode.

It helps to find the signal in the waterfall if one of the faster modes is used, i.e. Normal/Turbo, Fast, or Fast/Turbo, because you can see the borders between the tones as in the picture above. So, for my first experimental live transmission I've decided to use Fast (non-Turbo) mode. Set your Jason receive accordingly.

In trying to find the signal being transmitted 2 feet away I enlisted Fldigi, which provides a much broader view of course. The Jason signal shows up as a very narrow trace. In Normal or slower it is nearly a straight line as each tone has a longer duration the slower you go. At Fast you can definitely see the jagged line, which tells you that's the Jason signal.

So, at noon local time tomorrow, New Year's Eve, 1800Z, I will start transmitting the beacon text above on 10.131 MHz USB, Jason Fast mode. Since this is a 100% duty cycle transmission I'm going to compromise on the wattage, but still try to keep it high enough to ensure some success. I'm setting the K2 to 11W so that the 100W PA kicks in, but keeping the audio input turned down to a 4-5W signal out. The PA heatsink gets hot even at that, but not on fire. I may give it a 5 minute break now and then.

[Update: the K2 heat sink gets pretty hot even at that low power, so I've just decided I will do a 30 minute transmission at the top of each hour, 30 minutes off]

The plan is keep the beacon running for six hours in order to give folks plenty of time to fiddle with their rigs and the program to see if you can detect it. If you do, please drop me an e-mail or leave a comment below. Happy Jason hunting!

May Your New Year Be ... Interesting!

2011-12-30T08:52:00.000-06:00

Interesting. Which doesn't always mean happy. That's the nature of being human. Keep busy, keep learning, keep reaching out to other humans, make some new friends, help out some strangers, experience growth inside and outside yourself. Keep things interesting! Keep things alive.

Ham radio would seem a perfect fit to help our lives stay interesting. It is challenging and as wide as the sea. One could never hope to explore all its niches no matter how much time we had. On the other hand I think we would be cheating ourselves of what the hobby and life have to offer if all we did was sit in front of the rigs, on the towers, or at the workbench. Full enjoyment of the hobby requires some eyeball QSOs as well, some elmering, conventions, hamfests, or whatever gets us face-to-face with other hams or potential aficionados of the hobby (and it's a damn shame that nearly half the population seems excluded, i.e. the YLs).

As Dick, F8WBD, notes in his blog today, we should be careful also to not let our on-air QSOs become impersonal and non-interesting such as can happen in the digital modes where we may overuse the macros or where the mode doesn't support more personal contact well (e.g. JT65). That can happen in any mode of course, and maybe the traditional modes of CW and voice are the worst of the bunch in that regard during contests and in the heat of a DX pile-up. Slam, bam next!. Naturally, we can't spend all our time rag-chewing even if we are so inclined, however.

We've also come to a time when QSLing electronically has become the norm and the hard cards and the often present personal note on the card is falling out of vogue. I'm guilty of that as anybody. I used to relish designing my own "special event" cards, such as when I made an outing with the portable rig at the beach. Of course, I wasn't running pile-ups, so there weren't so many cards to send out.

All these "conveniences" of technology can lead to the quantity versus quality conundrum in our ham to ham contacts, but they can also widen our horizons and give us more feeling of community if we let them. Let's just not forget that behind our machines are real humans just like us, let's appreciate them (and ourselves in the process) in any small way we can in the coming new year.

May your propagation be long and strong! May your radios light up the ionosphere as never before! May your enjoyment of the hobby become your passion! And above all, have an interesting year in 2012.

73!

30 meters for the Elecraft KX1

2011-12-29T16:39:00.000-06:00

When the KX1 first came out Elecraft didn't offer the 2-band modules, e.g. the KXB3080. They did have a single band add-on kit, however, the KXB30, which only added 30 meters as its moniker implies. By the time I acquired a KX1 the KXB30 was no longer on their order page.
I called them up to inquire if they still had some KXB30 kits in stock.

Yes, they did! And at the original, much lower price than a KXB3080. I really had no desire to add 80 meters to the KX1 as I would be very unlikely to use that band portable and that kit is much more challenging than the single board KXB30.

Anyway, the kit arrived about a year ago but I didn't find the proverbial "Round Tuit" until yesterday.

What I figured would be an hour or two project turned into pretty much the whole afternoon. There are only a dozen components (btw, uncharacteristically a 1K Ohm resistor was missing) and soldering those in place didn't take long, but that's not the whole chore. First of all, the board is not fastened in place with any screws, instead being fixed in place thanks to about six stiff wires that are not the easiest things to route. You also have to spend some extra time making sure every lead is cut flush to the board and carefully bend components so that you can seat the board as close as possible to the IC underneath in order to have the necessary clearance from the front panel to avoid a short.

Besides all that it is necessary to re-align the receiver for all bands, which wouldn't have been too difficult had I the necessary alignment tool for the 20 and 40 meter variable caps, which weren't the standard slot for a flat-blade tool. I ended up having to carve up a flat blade tool to get a fit on those caps and even then it took a while to find discernible peaks in the .5W signal coming from my K2 through a dummy load.

That all done I re-assembled the KX1 only to discover that power output was nearly nil on all bands. In spite of having put a piece of electrical tape over the board one lead had managed to poke through and short to the front panel. I then carefully pried the board up at an angle and managed to maneuver a couple of caps to one side to give me an extra millimeter of clearance and I filed down the leads on that side of the board for good measure.

At last, the KX1 was restored to its nominal 4W output on all the bands and 30 meters was in place. I made a half-hearted effort to call CQ on that band from my Skyloop, but I was pretty much done for the day anyway, so I'll leave that for another day when I hook it up to the vertical here at the house.

One final note. Just to show that Elecraft has a sense of humor (or at least their tech writer does), take a look at this errata page from the assembly manual, which I have cut-n-paste to put the correction and associated footnote in close proximity. ;^D

Jason

2011-12-28T13:59:00.000-06:00

A couple posts back I displayed a list of various digital modes and their simulated SNRs. Jason (Turbo) was at the top of the list and all of us were curious about it, since we'd never heard of it. I did a little investigating and found a good copy of the program at the site of Alberto, I2PHD, the software author.The mode uses IFK (incremental frequency keying), with 6 bits of data encoding (and 2 bits for nibble synchronization) for a total of 64 characters, specifically ASCII 20h - 5Fh, all the upper case alphabet, digits, and most punctuation.

I ran into a question about how I was to transmit with this mode that wasn't directly answered by the documentation, but Alberto cleared that up in a brief e-mail exchange. I was confused as to why the selection of a PC port and an audio source were mutually exclusive in the menu. Turns out that even though the COM port can be used to key a rig, it's not really intended for that. A port is used only to transmit the signal. So, in order for me to transmit I use Flrig for the PTT and select the audio source in the menu through which I stream a text file (in beacon mode).

Alberto also advised me that the original motivation for Jason was use at LF and VLF frequencies, and not really as a chat mode. It's designed for high noise situations, though that certainly doesn't preclude its use on HF. As you can see, at its most robust speeds it is extremely slow (< 1 character/min), but it has a Fast Turbo speed that would be reasonable for QSOs if the band condx are good. It also uses very little bandwidth.

I don't think I'll be using Jason any time soon for a real QSO, but I would like to experiment with it for beacon use. Perhaps this weekend, with at least several hours notice on this blog, I will run it that way and perhaps one of my readers will be able to pick up the signal. Maybe Normal non-Turbo would be a good place to start.

A Good Christmas Eve Run on 30 Meter WSPR

2011-12-24T21:56:00.002-06:00

One watt to rooftop vertical. C91PM and JE5FLM were only heard by me.

New Tool and New Shelves

2011-12-24T14:56:00.000-06:00

My Christmas Eve is a pleasant one though it had one minor glitch around noon (see post on A Dull Roar) when I took one for the team while brush cutting.

One of my early Christmas presents (besides the Ten Tec Argo V) came from my elmer, Dan Keefe, W6WU a couple months ago. The Kreg Jig is a very handy tool for any woodworker. Anywhere you would use a dowel or biscuit in your work the Kreg Jig can help you do it in much less time. I really haven't tackled a large project with it yet. I just tried it out by making very simple pine shelves for my radio equipment down in the workshop below the house.

There are no screw holes visible thanks to the Kreg tool and it was a breeze to put these shelves together.

Since I taught myself some basic welding skills I have gotten into the habit of making most things out of metal, such as this shoe shelf below, which is one of Tamara's Christmas presents.

I guess I'd forgotten what a pleasure it can be to make things of wood, ... if you have the right tools. I'm actually not set up here for woodworking right now. Most of the tools are on the shelves in the shop and I lack proper tables and a roofed area in which to work. One of this coming year's resolutions is to finish extending the current outdoor shop area (where I weld and Tamara makes mosaics). We've already got the concrete pad poured, so it's a matter of welding up a roof structure and adding some sides, a little wiring, and then I can get the woodworking tools out of storage.

Once that's done I can imagine making a lot of useful things that combine metal framing and wood finish, solid structure and elegant tropical wood beauty together.

Digital Modes SNR Simulation

2011-12-22T17:28:00.002-06:00

Today I joined the DigitalRadio Yahoo! Group with the intention of finding afficionados of some of the less used digital modes for skeds. Once my membership was approved I received quite a lengthy and informative e-mail from the moderators, which included the data below regarding the relative (simulated) SNR of various digital modes. Certainly not an exhaustive list, but interesting nonetheless. They specifically left out JT65 and WSPR, which I'm sure would top the list. The table reinforces my impression that either Throb or Contestia are probably superior to Olivia based on bandwidth, copy accuracy, and speed. I'm anxious to give those a try.

Sensitivity Test #1 
 
Minimum SNR (no Ionosphere distortion) 
 
This test was conducted to reveal the weak signal potential of each mode before 
subjecting the signal to ionospheric distortion. The signal-to-noise ratios represent the weakest signal attainable while the mode decoded 100% of the message fed through the simulator. 
 
The "Quick Brown Fox" Pangram was used for each test. 
 
Jason Turbo (Fast)...............-25db 
PSK10............................-20db 
PSKAM10..........................-20db 
Contestia 500/32.................-15db 
DominoEX-4 ......................-15db 
FEC-31...........................-15db 
THROBX-4.........................-15db 
MFSK16...........................-14db 
THOR11...........................-14db 
RTTYM............................-13db* 
Contestia 500/16.................-13db 
CW 20 WPM.........................13db** 
THOR16...........................-12db 
Olivia 500/16 ...................-12db 
MFSK31*..........................-12db 
Olivia 500/8.....................-10db 
PSK31........................... -10db 
DominoEX-11.......................-8db 
MT63 1K...........................-8db 
Olivia 500/4..................... -8db 
PSK63.............................-7db 
Feld Hell.........................-7db 
RTTY 45...........................-5db 
PAX2..............................-2db 
HFPacket (300baud)................+1db

JT65A Annoyance

2011-12-21T19:28:00.003-06:00

The JT65 protocol appears to have an intrinsic "bug" when it comes to prefixed and suffixed call signs that potentially causes confusion for some and annoyance for me. This aspect is cooling my enthusiasm for the mode, since I must use a prefixed call (not that anyone in Costa Rica would really care, but still).

Specifically, it doesn't allow me to use my full prefix, TI2/, only a pre-set prefix TI/. This causes logging problems for me and those contacts who are QSLing via eQSL or LoTW, since there is no TI/NA7U in anyone's call database. Before uploading a JT65 log I have to manually edit my own call sign to the full TI2/NA7U. For my contacts, they have to do the same, but often don't realize it until the call is rejected by eQSL or LoTW and then they e-mail me asking for help.

I've got a couple of pending questions about this snafu to the Yahoo! and Google JT65 groups, but I really don't see a clean way out. Because the JT65 spec excludes the grid locator if you use a prefix doesn't help the situation, either. If I were to sign with just NA7U my grid locator would issue but wouldn't that be a bit confusing and furthermore I'd then be located in the wrong part of the globe by Reverse Beacon and PSKReporter.

If I use no prefix and try to enter TI2NA7U the program disables TX.

The only semi-reasonable approach I've tried is to use TI/NA7U as the JT65-HF call and put "LOG TI2/NA7U" in my sign-off message manually, hoping that will forestall confusion on the other end.

That approach has in itself yet another issue, however. I've had tail-enders see that sign-off message and then call me with TI2/NA7U. Since JT65-HF knows that I'm really TI/NA7U it won't recognize the "2" call and thus auto-replies don't work. Sigh ... This feature is why I can't even use CQ TI2/NA7U manually (I could I guess, but then the whole QSO has to be done manually).

All this is just about enough to put me off my JT65 feed, so to speak, since there are plenty of other nifty modes to explore that don't present this kind of glitch.

On-air Status

2011-12-20T09:42:00.001-06:00

To the left I've added a Twitter gadget to log my current/last on-air activity. I thought this might be better than wasting a post on just my current radio activity.

First Time JT65A

2011-12-18T14:47:00.003-06:00

Well, first successful time anyway. I actually gave it a whirl yesterday, but was in a rush so didn't bother to read instructions, figuring I could intuitively make it work. I botched my first QSO as I didn't account for the delay in reply, the wife was calling that she was ready to go to dinner with friends, ... well, I aborted that attempt.

Right now, I am on 17 meters, 18102 KHz to be exact, running 1 watt and have made a couple proper JT65A QSOs to the States and plan to keep it up for the next hour or so.

I find it to be a bit of an odd duck this mode, but it's amusing and I'm anxious to use it for some personal Km/W records. So far, probably just because it's new to me, the slowness of it and the limitation on info exchanged doesn't bother me at all. It's sort of relaxing. I find the sound of it rather pleasant too. You can just about whistle it!

[UTC 21:53: Now on 20 meters,14.076]
[UTC 23:17: Now on 40 meters,7.076]

Olivia! Olivia!

2011-12-16T19:57:00.001-06:00

Here's what Olivia 16/500 looks like in Fldigi. That's a PSK31 signal off to the left side of the waterfall for comparison.

I'd only used this mode once before so I thought I was able to recognize the pattern. The caller was JA1RZD in Tokyo. We had a very long chat of about 50 minutes exchanging descriptions of our respective living places. Ken was putting out 250W into a 5-element tri-bander versus my 50W into the quad. Really high power for a weak signal mode! :^)

I'd love to work more of the "exotic" digi-modes like Olivia, such as Throb, DominoEx, Contestia, etc. in order to get the "feel" of them. While I love Olivia's 100% print, it is too slow for my taste. PSK31 or PSK63 on the other hand are about the right speed, but the copy is so sensitive to the condition of the path that it often gets garbled. I'm wondering if one of the other modes presents a Goldilocks functionality that's in between the two above. Trouble is, of course, that it's hard to find a QSO since they appear so rarely. I haven't yet found a reliable sked page for these other modes, but I keep looking.

WSPR Antarctica

2011-12-16T13:49:00.000-06:00

Just 10 minutes ago I set up on WSPR 10 meters with the vertical (1W). Right off the bat my first reception report was DP1POL in Antarctica! Cool (bad pun intended).

The station call is apparently operated by Felix Reiss, DL5XL, though the data on QRZ are a bit dated, so one can't be sure.

The station is at a German research post in its third incarnation. It's a fascinating read about how they have constructed this new station to compensate for the buildup of snow that seems to have doomed the two previous stations. From their web site:

"A primary feature of the new station is the ability to compensate for adverse effects of snow and ice accumulation by means of hydraulic elevation of the building, without leaving parts of the construction to be swallowed by snow."

I hope they are enjoying their summer weather!

[Be sure to see the comment to this post from Felix, DL5XL]

Another try at being DX

2011-12-13T17:34:00.001-06:00

RufzXP can be a maddening program to use, but all I can say is it works. Little by little (poco a poco as they say in Spanish) my scores improve, my speed goes up, but the error rate never drops, which is by design. My highest correct copy speed has been 31 WPM and I'm getting comfortable with copying calls at 25 WPM or higher during the trial runs.

Tonight I wanted to put the learning to the real test, on the air. I just got off 30 meters with the vertical and K2 running 100W. The pile-up started almost immediately and seemed deeper than last time, but judicious use of the RIT control and some additional confidence made it all a lot smoother. I was only on for less than an hour but worked 49 stations and I think with maybe only a couple of busted calls. There were only a fraction that I got on the first try, but the fills go smoother now.

Unfortunately, I don't seem to be picking up any new countries. I might be better off trying some S&P instead, which N1MM Logger makes a fairly easy task with its band maps. "Running" here gets a lot of U.S. signals, which obviously I don't need for my second run at DXCC, hi! Maybe I should set my aim for WAS again?

I had been working on my code speed with G4FON as you know, but have been totally focused on RufzXP for more than two weeks now. When I did open up G4FON again I noticed a significant increase in my copy speed from the last time I used that program. And, of course, now I am learning new reflexes typing the call signs that I didn't have before. I feel like I'm entering a new phase in my ham "career" I guess.

73 es gud dx!!

TI2/NA7U now on LoTW

2011-12-09T10:36:00.001-06:00

At long last, after a few attempts, I've managed to get LoTW approval for TI2/NA7U. I've already uploaded one log that covers up to 11/20/2011 for this year.

Previously, the process hit a snag because of the unsettled regulatory situation here in Costa Rica. A couple of years ago the authority for ham radio licensing was transferred from a defunct agency to SUTEL, which, like the FCC, is responsible for all telecommunications areas in the country. Ham radio is low on their priority list and new regulations have been long in coming and it will probably be a couple more years before this is resolved. In the meantime, there has been an official ruling in place for a year or two that states that N.A. hams may operate here with the appropriate TI prefix without any application or documentation other than their valid home country license.

That wasn't good enough for the ARRL, however, until recently. They now allow LoTW status for TI*/ calls with no further documentation other than a certificate signed by my already authenticated home call. Hallelujah!

No more need be said on that topic now. As for LoTW itself, my editorial opinion is that they have made the entire process far more complicated than it needs to be. In this day and age there needn't be any dependency on client software applications to instill confidence in the authenticity of hams' submitted logs. Passwords should be quite enough. Their site could enforce high password standards and require changing of passwords on a regular basis if they want to be more secure than, say, eQSL. I mean, that's a good enough scheme for my online banking. There's a far greater chance that someone wants to get their hands on my money on-line than my QSLs.

I realize that contestors take the hobby (and I sometimes think people forget it is just a hobby) more seriously and to them a perceived higher degree of integrity gives them the warm fuzzies. For the average ham looking for WAS, DXCC, etc. this extra complexity is just unnecessary. We know what we accomplished. We don't need a nanny to force us through hoops to verify that.

Perhaps the ARRL will look at their own numbers (see left) to understand that the uptake of their system looks like it is suffering (only a fraction of QSOs turning into QSLs) and that it could be because they've made the bar too high. I wish I had the comparable numbers for eQSL.

Ruffing It

2011-12-03T15:02:00.001-06:00

As part of my "mission" to be a good DX target I've been attacking one of my weaker points, call sign copy, using a couple of free software trainers, namely RufzXP-Tancredi, and MorseRunner. MorseRunner is excellent for simulating pile-ups replete with QSB, QRN, QRM and even LID operators. But, for straight-up pedal to the metal call sign copy speed improvement I don't think there is a better program than RufzXP.

Its algorithm is almost brutal in Toplist mode. Fifty call signs coming at you of varying pitch and the slash calls are not spared. If you get one right your reward is that the program goes faster!! You are always driven to improve instrinsically, but it can be frustrating, too. It seems designed such that one always gets about 40-50% of the calls wrong (at least that's how it works for me). However, the faster you go the more points you can rack up. If you start making repeated errors then the speed slows again, which always makes me feel a little discouraged.

You can allow the program to post your most recent top score on the Toplist, but I have shied away from that given how large is the gap between my current scores and about 95% of the scores on that list!

If you just happen to be the sort who doesn't enjoy bashing your head against brick walls over and over again you can always drop back to Train Mode, which gives you access to a lot more training parameters. You can limit the number of calls per set, you can decide what kinds of calls you want to train on and can vary or eliminate the speed-up for correct calls entered.

Because of how challenging this program can be I think it is really improving both my copy and my CW-to-keyboard skills, though sometimes it seems that progress is at a snail's pace. I think the best way to approach the program is to not even pay attention to the scores and don't let all the missed calls get to you.

If I had one feature I could add it would be a graphing page that would plot not just your high score but a band created by your highest and lowest WPM for each set. That feature would be a great motivator I think.

I must confess ...

2011-11-23T11:25:00.001-06:00

... that after my first gushingly positive post with regard to the announcement of the new KX3 by Elecraft that my desire to possess one has cooled, ... considerably. I know exactly when the turning point came, too. It was about a month or so ago when I viewed that well-known (amongst hams) video of Wayne Burdick showing off a pre-release KX3 at Dayton.

As I watched that video it suddenly struck me that, though this was indeed a technical marvel of a radio, it was headed in the wrong direction, in my opinion. It was like, wow, look at all those knobs and buttons and that bright (albeit small) screen with so much info, ... but, wait a minute look at all those knobs and buttons ... Another example of a very hard-wired interface in the day and age when SDR is really starting to get a foothold. SDR promises flexible, configurable, imaginative interfaces to the RF ether (well, within the constraints of very limited imagination evident in most ham software).

It was precisely at that moment when the thought about what could be done drained the yearning from my covetous ham heart.

Don't take my current lack of enthusiasm the wrong way, however. I think the KX3 is a fantastic radio still, and I'd be quite proud and happy to have one in the shack. This is not sour grapes. I think there is a lot of bang for the buck there and I wouldn't cast aspersions on anyone who had one, but neither do I think would I feel much envy.

As we all know, our budgets (and shelves) are limited. We have to make tradeoffs. One has to imagine owning the object of desire and sit with those thoughts for a while in order to avoid the impulse to buy the latest and greatest (if that is our conclusion). In my case, having a really portable radio is already filled by my KX1, which is further from a KX3 than the apple from the orange, but I love it's coupling of simplicity and capability. It is all I need for those brief and infrequent outings to the mountains or the beach. Besides, the newness and "fun" itches have now been scratched by the Ten Tec 516, which has all the simplicity and capabilities I really need for a home-based TXVR. And at less cost. Of course, my K2s will always have a place on the shelf!

Of course, in part, none of us is immune to that fade of avarice between the time a product is announced and when it is released. Elecraft might have been smarter to pull in the actual ship date of the KX3 a lot closer to the Dayton announcement and perhaps they may have snagged more hams like me.

CW outing on N1MM Logger

2011-11-19T19:32:00.001-06:00

I had a profitable hour or so on my first outing using N1MM logger in "Runner" mode. It doesn't take long to get the hang of it, but I was fortunate that I didn't get any pileups more than 3 or 4 deep. It's really a pleasure to be able to skip around the bands, see the DX spots and have all my contacts automatically logged. Yeah, Casey, welcome to the 20th century, hi!

I have to admit to feeling just a little guilty sending CW from the keyboard. It was also hard to resist the urge to ragchew, especially when an op sent their name in the exchange. But, no reason I can't divide my sessions amongst both rag-chewing and contest-style.

During the dry spells tonight on 40 meters and 12 meters I had the thought that I would probably from now on relegate the Argo and the K2 to different roles, The former for digital, QRP, casual contacts, and the K2 for the QRO DXing activities. Seems like a natural divide for the two rigs.

Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. ;^)

2011-11-13T10:06:00.001-06:00

I've been easing myself into learning how to use the N1MM logger. I don't particularly like the complexity of it and have looked at a couple alternatives, such as XMLog and SwissLog, but I'm drawn by the partial call check feature that other free loggers don't seem to have. That one feature, I think, would be a great help in pile-ups.

I was visiting the N1MM Logger Yahoo! Group for questions and as a result of that one of the members, Art, R8TX, sent me an e-mail asking for a sked on 30 M. Sure, why not? I waited for him on 10117 at 9 PM local last night. Just before 9 I heard R8AY (busted call?) calling CQ 599 so I worked him. R8TX didn't show up right away so I started calling him. I knew I was setting myself up, but continued. Soon,F6IWD interrupted me and I worked him. Then F3CW interrupted my calling R8TX, I worked him. Then the fun began.

For about the next hour I worked over 25 stations (RZ6BX, UT7VR, RK6AM, finally heard R8TX and worked him, UR2VA, HA9RT, OE6MDF, DL1NKS, SP6FEO, VE2OPB, etc., etc., and a handful of U.S. stations) back to back as fast as my inexperienced ears could go.This time was much better than the last. At least I didn't feel like I did a face plant in the middle of the band, hi! I'm hoping the next pile-up I can handle from a logger as I was still copying the calls by pen and now have to manually log everything. I'm sure there are a few busted calls in my list as well that I hope I can sort out.

BTW, we tried to get Sean on for his first QSO last night on PSK31. 10 meters was open across the Pacific and I'd already worked a VK3 before I set Sean in front of the radio and started a quickie tutorial on how to make a PSK QSO. Unfortunately, by the time he started calling CQ the band closed up and didn't come back. That is the only band his license allows data mode, so that was that. We will, perhaps try again today or try a practice phone QSO between the house and workshop stations.

73!

KF7SLA

2011-11-08T21:12:00.000-06:00

Kilo Foxtrot 7 Sierra Lima Alpha, Sean's new call! Just found it on the FCC site minutes ago. Really not too bad a call, but I'll bet Sean will go for a vanity 1 x 3 before too long. Good thing he's too young to know about the Symbionese Liberation Army, hi!

In other news, I've been on a steady but irregular sked with TI7/AA2UP, Rich, who lives up in Tilarán, about 120 Km north of here. He wanted someone to help refurbish his CW skills. It's good for me, too as it keeps me from neglecting the rigs and CW. I sometimes forget how much I like that mode.

It's also been fun trying all the different bands at different times of the day to see what works best on the short haul. For morning skeds, it seems that 30 meters serves us well. Little QRN or QRM and s7 both ways. 80 meters was a flop, especially since I don't really have an antenna at the house station to cover that band. 40 meters often has a lot of QRM/QRN even during the day. Today we were both QRP on 30, he with a KX1, me with the TT 516, which has been my mainstay this past week.

I'm now studying the so-called Quick Start guide (40 pages!) for N1MM Logger, which, if I can master it, could be very helpful during the next pile-up. I've never been much for typing and S/R code thus far in my ham "career", so that's something new to learn. I'm also practicing with Morserunner to help me better pick up calls from the pack. A third step is to find a text file of worldwide call signs and load them up in G4FON for practice. Anyway, nice to have a radio-related project that is not antennas. I've exhausted that line of activity for a while (maybe).

Sean and I are putting together a Code Practice Oscillator with built-in key as an exercise in soldering and learning to fiddle with electronics as well as a step towards him learning the Code. Meantime, I think we'll probably get him on the phone bands to get his feet wet making QSOs. Should be fun for both of us!

Pile-up ... on me!

2011-11-07T19:37:00.001-06:00

Flustered, fazed, discombobulated, all those things! That's how I felt when I called on 30 meters tonight and suddenly found myself on the receiving end of a DX pile-up. You'd think that would have happened many times here, but it really hasn't. I sometimes get a few tail-enders, but nothing like tonight. A blur of call signs coming from all over the States and Europe hit me and I was floundering. At the first lull, after I'd badly worked 11 stations (U.S., Denmark, Germany, Ukraine, Italy, ...) I took the opportunity to bow out.

I'm more of a rag chew kind of op and that's more or less how I started out with the first few stations. I did get into a halting rhythm after a while, but there wasn't a single call I didn't have to ask for a fill on at least twice. Checking over the log I see I still copied a couple of them wrong. I certainly came away with a better appreciation for the talents of the ops in DXpeditions and real contesters.

But, you know what? I think this is something I could get used to! I definitely want to dive in again, though first I'm going to work on some skills off-line so I'm not a total LID next time. Obviously, the vertical is getting out when condx are good, as I was only using 20 watts, and I should take advantage of that while it lasts. If anyone has some tips on this kind of operating, please, ... chime in!

73!

Verticals Wrap-up

2011-11-04T19:42:00.004-06:00

At left is the "triumvirate" of my antenna farm here. The quad on top, followed by the "laboratory" mast, currently supporting the folded VK2ABQ, and finally the verticals nest just visible in the center of the peak of the roof.

I put finishing touches on the verticals the last couple of days, including messing with the Hamstick 10 meter mobile whip and replacing the temporary mixed feed-line with a single piece of RG-8/U.

I'm not sure how much good the Hamstick does, but I did work a lot of mobile CW, including DX, with it on my car in Oregon and now it has a heckuva good ground plane up there. It was going unused and has a handy magnetic mount, so it seemed like the thing to do. Actually, the 30 meter vertical tunes 10 meters also, but only the high-end of the band.

In the composite picture of the AA-54's SWR readings at the operating position you can see that the 10M SWR is still a bit high on the low end of the band versus the top end. The low point in the SWR is about 29 MHz. Still, given that it's only a 50 foot run to the antennas, the difference in signal loss between a perfect match and 2.6:1 at the bottom end of the band only amounts to about .15 dB, so it's not a big deal. The other two bands tune nicely and, I'm presuming, because of the use of tubing, they are broad-banded.

Before I put the analyzer away I decided to see what it looked like for 6 meters. It's almost perfectly flat across the band, but between 3.8-4.0:1 SWR. This time because of the higher frequency the loss is about .9 dB, significant, but not fatal. Fortunately, the LDG AT-200Pro tunes 6 meters, so I have a path to transmit there once I figure out how to properly hook up the 6 meter transverter.

As my luck would have it, yesterday we had an intense electrical storm that seemed to hover over the house. Tamara and I were convinced that at least two of the bolts had hit the house by the strange sounds we were hearing coincident with the terrific, window-shaking thunder. This spooked the XYL who started insisting that my antennas were "attracting" lightning. I did climb up there the next day and saw absolutely no sign of a strike anywhere and managed to mollify her suspicions, ... so far. Hopefully, the summer season will arrive early, which puts an end to the lightning storms for several months, hi!

Another NA7U Creation ... err ... Contraption!

2011-11-02T07:31:00.000-06:00

I'm still attending to the leftover details of the quad re-installation, but have been finding time in between that and the usual chores to work on the 40 meter vertical. I love projects like this where I work from basically a vague image in my mind and gradually contrive the thing into being. Of course, this one had it's obvious constraints, one being that I wanted it to match up to the existing base for the 30 meter vertical on the left.

But, what is all that stuff anyway? Allow me to explain...

The 40 meter vertical is a 1/4 wavelength long, starting with 1" tube, tapering to 3/8" aluminum. Because of the increased length I wanted a tilt-over base to make it easier to tune. The 30 meter vertical I can just pop out of the base after loosening the clamps and couple of the guy cords, no problem.

Just adding that hinge made things a bit more complicated (OK, a lot more complicated). Now I had to worry about bracing, leveling, adding a ground wire, etc.

I also wanted to tie the 30 and 40 meter elements to one feedline, which I'd read works quite well even with the elements closely spaced (and it's true!). One more thing: with 33 feet of aluminum sticking straight up over the roof I had to do something to ease my mind a bit with regards to lightning. Thus, the spark plug shunt gaps were added. I had a lot of these plugs so why not put one in for each band and tie them all together.

Three bands? Yeah, there was that 10 meter hamstick in the corner collecting dust, why not add it too? Everyone needs at least one 10 meter vertical! Yesterday I got it all put together, but that story is for a later post.

New Ham in the Clan!

2011-10-31T12:58:00.001-06:00

Last weekend was the CQ WW SSB contest as I'm sure you know. A crack team came down from the States to work the contest as TI5N at Keko Diez's (TI5KD) place in Alajuela, west of the San José airport. There was a quorum of VEC's and VE's in the group so that they could administer U.S. amateur radio tests. This kind of opportunity for U.S. ex-pats here does not happen very often, maybe once a year.

With about a month's notice I got Sean working on the Technician Class question pool almost daily in preparation. At times it was a bit like herding chickens to get him to persist in going over the 396 questions in the pool week after week. After we did this all manually with printouts he switched over to the exam program on QRZ.com. Eventually, he was scoring mostly over 80% so we figured he was ready (minimum to pass is 70%).

The drive up last Friday did not start off well, however. We left with plenty of time to make it by 9 AM, but one hour out I suddenly realized I'd forgotten his passport, so we had to double back. That extra two hours plus delays due to extensive roadwork on the Interamericana Highway made the usual 3 hour drive into twice that long. Fortunately, we weren't actually late as the contest didn't start until 6 PM that afternoon.

After filling out all the paperwork Sean was ready for the test and they took him over to Keko's rancho, where he could concentrate away from the hub-bub of a dozen hams and their XYL's meeting and greeting one another.

Sean receiving his pass certificate from KB8OCP

Yes, he passed! It was a squeaker, but he should have his new call by the end of this week if they make the filing this Thursday as promised. Now to work on some basic operating skills so he can get on the air right away!

We had a nice Tico Typico lunch with the team and Keko and headed back about 2 PM. The trip back was even worse than the trip up, unfortunately. Traffic was heavy all across San José, still delays over road work, and then pea soup fog on the way down the mountain. Nearly six hours on the return, but it was all worth it. in the end.

Argo V PSK working now, WSPR not so much

2011-10-25T18:05:00.000-06:00

Instead of guessing at the right values for a voltage divider attenuator, I wired in a 100K audio pot to the audio out line from the Ten Tec Argonaut V. Setting it right about in the middle gives me a lot more wiggle room on the Windows mic level control now. I may just use it this way or measure the values and use fixed resistors all shrink-wrapped up.

Clearly, the waterfall is now cleaned up as it should be.

Little joy on the TT516 for WSPR use, however. There the CAT control seems entirely broken. Can't change frequency, can't PTT. Just gives protocol and command rejected errors. I did manage to receive by changing frequency manually and was able to transmit using the PTT control in Flrig, but that's hardly a solution.

I've seen indirectly that a few folks have gotten it working with their Argonaut V, though. I have an e-mail out to VK4CRO to see how he did it. I hope I don't have to make up a special mic cable and trigger off DTR or RTS on the serial port directly. I wonder why the TT516 control commands don't work in WSPR 2.11 anyway. Perhaps they were never tested?

Adjusting to the Argo V on PSK

2011-10-24T19:00:00.002-06:00

Working with the Ten Tec 516 on PSK has not been the slam dunk I thought it was going to be, for two reasons. I'm pretty sure the AUX cable that came with it is the factory cable, but the audio out (connects to the PC audio in) appears to be at line level not mic level so it's too hot for this PC (see pic).

I only have a mic input on this laptop, no line-in. The waterfall looks like the above at the absolute lowest setting of the mic volume control with mic boost off. I made an in-line attenuator but it seems to attenuate too much. Using the speaker jack instead of the AUX line brings in too much noise and ground loop lines. Surprisingly, however, I can run this way and the red traces decode just fine. I'm going to try and work up a just-right attenuator, however. There is no control in the rig itself for attenuation.

A last resort for me might be to get an outboard sound card unit such as the Signalink, but I'm not going there yet.

The other problem I had was in using Fldigi for rig control. With the K2 I use the Hamlib interface (never tried RigCAT), which works flawlessly. Hamlib with the TT516 is very flakey and RigCAT is only less flaky. The TT516 Yahoo! Group came to my rescue, though, by turning me on to Flrig, which I didn't know existed.

It runs as a separate window but acts as a client to Fldigi's server and runs without a hitch. It's a much better control than either Hamlib or RigCAT provide. With the proper command string I should be able to launch a specific invocation for each rig.

So, you can see I'm making progress with the Argonaut V, but not quite there yet. I've been getting the feel of it on 10 meters PSK31 the last few evenings as long as the band stays open. I really like the simplicity of the rig and absolutely love the IF Bandwidth control, which gives me 200 Hz to 3000 Hz and all points between at the twist of a knob. Of course, the K2 is clearly the better rig overall (though a bit uglier in looks if you will allow me to say so) so it's unlikely to collect much dust ever.

RF Plumbing

2011-10-23T08:18:00.000-06:00

The trip to the San José airport on Thursday started off great, then, literally, took a turn for the worse 80 Km out. Past the peak of Cerro de La Muerte part of the road had slid away and it was completely blocked with heavy equipment. We could see bus passengers on the other side walking towards the buses parked on our side. Apparently, this was the third day of repair but there was not a single sign along the highway to warn us, no detour, nada. Typical.

So, we had to backtrack about 5 Km to another road that wound through several small towns and added an hour to our journey. Of course we had to repeat the detour on the way back. After a total of 8+ hours of driving I was exhausted and feeling a bit ill on Friday so we kicked back, pored over the goodies Tamara brought back from Ukraine and the States and listened to the tales of her travels.

Saturday I got back into the swing of things and tackled the job of moving the radio gear from its "temporary" perch on a low cabinet near the window to my desk. This included adding the new Ten Tec 516 (aka Argonaut V) to the mix. I guess I'd forgotten the days when I ran more than one radio at once and all the extra "plumbing" one has to do for switching antennas, keys, interface cables, etc. It's all pretty much sorted out now, however.

The 516 came with a "data cable", which is just a DIN plug with a couple of audio plugs on the other end for connecting to your computer's audio ports. I was led to believe that no other equipment is necessary, it's plug-n-play to set up for PSK, etc. It also has a serial port for rig control.

With Fldigi I could not reliably talk to the 516 using Hamlib as I do with the K2. It does work with RigCAT, though. The problem I have now is that the audio in level is way too high. Even at the lowest setting on the sound card the waterfall is completely yellow with the tracks red. There seems to be no way to attenuate the signal coming from the AUX1 jack. Later today I will try using the headphone jack and external speaker jack for the input and gather advice from a 516 Yahoo! Group if needed.

You may notice that since the 516 doesn't have an ATU that I took out from mothballs my LDG AT200Pro tuner, which is sitting between the two radios. Finally, a use for it, hi! It's working really well with the quad. In fact, I can easily tune 30 and 40 meters (as can the K2 ATU). I WSPR'd on 30M yesterday with the quad for a short while and was getting 2-way contacts from Alaska to Israel in short order. I won't vouch for the radiation pattern on those bands, but it's nice to know I can use them in a pinch.

Besides working out the use of the Argo V on data modes I still have to hook up the quad's rotor control and make a cable for the final leg from the 30 meter vertical. I'm waiting on a replenishment of my PL-259 stock so that I can shorten some of the cables in my plumber's nightmare made out of what I had on hand. Also, I haven't gotten around to reading the manual for the TT 6 meter transverter, which is sitting idle for now on top of the LDG ATU. Oh, and there is of course the cleaning of the debris trail I've left behind in the shop after the momentous moving of the quad up the hill.

Tuesday I Got Lucky ...

2011-10-19T20:18:00.002-06:00

... twice!

No, not that kind of lucky! I mean if it were that kind of lucky I sure wouldn't blog about it, and in any case would deny everything and demand proof! ;^)

I'm talking antenna lucky (booooring!). First off, the rain held off until nearly noon, so I had a lot of time to play with tuning the quad and running cables. If you recall, plan C was to run a coax line to the bottom of the tower, hook it to a tuner and see if I could get a reasonable match on all bands. I did and I could. With the old G3VKM (the homebrewer from whom I bought it a decade ago) L-C tuner on minimum inductance and mid-range capacitance settings the SWR on 17 meter was nearly halved again and there was even improvement on other bands.

This was progress! I toted the tuner back to the shack, popped the top and took measurements of L and C, rummaged through my parts bins and made up a quicky network to try in place of the tuner. Unfortunately, it didn't make a very good replacement. I realized then that I had no choke balun in-line and wondered if that could be the cause of SWR wonkiness.

At this point I thought I was actually unlucky because I couldn't locate my super duper Force 12 choke balun. After wasting 20 minutes looking for it I grabbed a homebrew balun combo consisting of about 10 turns of coax on a 4" pipe preceded by a bead balun made from hamfest ferrites of unknown composition. Should work in a pinch anyway, eh?

Just for grins, and to see if I might be on the right track, I plugged in this balun by itself without the network. Miracles do happen and this turned out to be my lucky stroke of the day! The SWR across all 5 bands was even better than what I'd read with the tuner in-line. Yay. So, as far as tuning, that was that and I was off to the races making up cables, routing them, scrounging rotor wire, weatherproofing, etc. All that ran into today, Wednesday, and as it was getting dark I was just cleaning up the attendant mess.

Coax and rotor cable pass-through

As I noted in a previous post, my 6" barrel connectors were about an inch too short to get through the upstairs wall, so I fabricated my own with 4 SO-239s and some coax in between them. The quad gets one jack and the VK2-f and vertical will share the second one via a switch. There are two rotors, but I only had enough 6-conductor cable for the quad rotor and even had to swipe some from the VK2-f to make that happen. 3-conductor cable for the other rotor is on its way. It was serendipity that I had both a 9-pin cable connector and 9-slot terminal strip!

All the coax cables come first to a grounding strip at the edge of the balcony, which is tied to #6 copper wire that heads straight down to a ground rod. These connectors are, for now, only sealed with tape as they are well under the eave of the roof.

All the other out-in-the-weather connections of all types get a full treatment of electrical tape, sometimes followed by a wrap of cold-seal tape, and then a nice goopy layer of fibrous asphalt patching cement (aka roofing tar!). This is a tip I picked up from TI5KD. Messy, but it really keeps the water out, much better than any kind of silicone.

Oh, and that SWR? Well, here's the readout from the AA-54 right at the wall jack (and confirmed by the K2 and Daiwa meters).

Everyone, except that spoiled brat 17M, is pretty happy. I'm quite satisfied that I've been able to bring down the SWR on 17M to 4.0, which is a vast improvement from where I started. Yes, the SWR above that coil choke is still about 8:1 on 17, but it's running over only a 20 foot coax run, which is only about an extra .5 dB out of a total of 2.3 dB of loss. Not pretty, but still it means a doubling of my ERP without catching the coax on fire, hi.

Probably I'm not going to make much more progress over the next couple of days. Tomorrow Sean and I pick up my wife, his mom, at the airport in San Jose', which is pretty much and all day trip. It's time for me to slow down a little anyway and spend time with my wife. Later I will begin the task of re-locating the "shack" from the low cabinet by the window to my desk and book shelves, including getting the Argo V going and a new/used Core Duo laptop I recently acquired for a song. Until then ... get lucky!

Up the tower

2011-10-18T06:08:00.002-06:00

Yesterday morning it was foggy but the rain held off until about 9 or 10. I was able to spend time on the tower with the RigExpert AA54 (look closely, you can see it hanging off the 20/17 meter loop) to see what I could do with the SWR.

A shorting bar, essentially making a hairpin match, on the extensions of the feed point helped some, but 17 meters was still stubbornly high. Adding shunt capacitance took things in the wrong direction.

Then I remembered that I'd run across a small balun-like thingee in a box of cable odds and ends. It seemed to my foggy memory that it was probably a 2:1 transformer from a previous Lightning Bolt quad I'd owned.

Sure enough, when I added that in series the SWR readings were more or less halved. Placing it at various points along the feed point extensions showed that it was best at a spot closest to the loop.

In the end I have a near perfect match on 20M, well under 2:1 SWR on 15 and 12, under 3:1 on 10M. 17 meters is much lower but still a whopping 8:1. However, this does put me in the range where I could feed with RG-8/U coax and live with the power loss on 17 meters. I'd still have nearly twice my input power as my ERP on that band, which is not so horrible in my opinion.

Before the rain started I didn't get a chance to try another experiment, which is to run a short feed line to the ground and use an LC tuner to see if I can get a good average SWR including 17 meters. If that is successful then I could measure the values in the tuner and make my own LC network to add to the mix. Maybe today, maybe not. October is our rainiest month and though it's not raining at the moment, that could change shortly.

I spent most of the rest of the day puttering on the balcony where I drilled a hole for a coax pass-through. The extended barrel connector I had was about 1 inch short, so it turned into a big project to make my own boxes with SO-239s connected with cables through the wall. This was better anyway as I was able to make a double outlet. Today I have to clean up the mess on the balcony and drill another hole through the concrete for the rotor cables. Tomorrow is a major house-cleaning day and the maid can't make it, so it's up to us bachelors to make it all spic-n-span before the XYL returns on Thursday!

Early Morning Blather

2011-10-17T05:05:00.000-06:00

I awoke at 4 AM today, feeling refreshed and wishing it were light out so I could start fiddling with the quad again. In addition to just getting the darn thing up in the air I have been working on a "final solution" (ha ha) to routing the cables from both the quad and the VK2-f (my new shorthand for the folded VK2ABQ) into the house. It was rather a hodgepodge up till now.

The SWR on the quad with all the elements tied together is not horrible, ... except for 17 meters, one of my favorites. There it's well north of 10:1 and unless I build some 600 ohm line there is going to be a lot of loss. I have ideas, though, always more ideas. If the rain allows I will try, in order, a shorting bar on the feed, a shunt capacitor across the feed, hooking up a big clunky ATU I have on a short lead and, if I get a decent match, read out the LC settings and see if I can make a matching network from the junk box. If all else fails it's back to making 1/4 wl matching stubs for each band and using the remote switch.

All the above experiments are made sooooo much easier by the Multi-SWR feature in the RigExpert AA-54 analyzer. With that I can quickly set 5 center frequencies of interest, hit OK and see the SWR on all those freqs at once in real-time as I make changes. Select one of those frequencies and hit All and you get a full readout of Z, R, X. It makes the old MFJ analyzer look like a Ford Model-T, plus it's light, making it great for tower work.

If the weather doesn't cooperate I can probably while away an hour or two drilling a couple more holes for cables in the upstairs wall. It's aboout 6 inches of concrete filled cement block, which is not too bad, except that I always seem to get "lucky" and find a re-bar. I can also spend time re-arranging the shack setup from on top of a low cabinet to where it really should be, the shelves above my desk and computer.

Well, off to the races as they say ...

Quad WSPRing on 20 meters

2011-10-15T12:31:00.002-06:00

The quad is up, pointed north (no rotor control yet), and jury-rig fed with some of that 200 ohm phone line I snarfed up a couple weeks ago. I've set it to WSPRing on 20 meters, 2W out. Pics and more later ...

Slide Show from YDXA 2011 Operation at TI5N

2011-10-13T17:16:00.000-06:00

You may recall a previous post about the Youth DX Adventure operation at TI5N (Keko Diez's place, TI5KD). Here is a link to some terrific photos of the kids working the DX hard. I find it very encouraging to see these youngsters so involved with the hobby.

My own son, Sean, is just about finished studying for his Tech exam, which will be given on the 28th, also at Keko's place. He's been putting in a lot of effort in spite of having a bad cold this week. These test opportunities don't come around very often down here so it would be a shame to miss it. I hope he has enough time to at least skim the questions for the General exam, which he'll be eligible to take at the same session if he passes Tech. Tech HF privileges are very limited, so the General ticket would be quite a plus.

Ironically, there is still no mechanism in place - since the new Costa Rican regulatory agency took over ham licenses - for a Tico to get a radio license, but Sean, as a U.S. citizen can and will be allowed to operate from here using a TI2 prefix.

WSPR 30 meters overnight result

2011-10-13T05:48:00.000-06:00

Well, I was lucky again tonight that the power stayed up and everything was still purring along WSPR-wise this morning. The map looks very good, very similar to the previous night, but this time with 2 watts out. I especially like that I was able to exchange signals with some of my fellow ham bloggers, G4ILO, PE4BAS, and PC4T. Perhaps when I have time to master JT65A we can have real QSOs! Also, the Greenland contact, N36UP, was a first for me.

WSPR tonight and Quad progress

2011-10-12T12:26:00.000-06:00

Update: First successful decode at 2248: PE4BAS!
2224 -26 -0.8 10.140275 1 PE4BAS JO33 30

Update:

2011-10-13 00:14

TI/NA7U

10.140114

-25

EJ89dk

PC4T

JO22io

9069

2011-10-13 00:14

TI/NA7U

10.140139

-24

EJ89dk

G4ILO

IO84hp

8532

--------------------------------------------------------------

No pictures this post. It's not very exciting to see a tower laying on the ground. We had one of those wish-someone-had-a-camera moments about 7 AM, though. My neighbor and his man Friday (aka William) came up to help me haul the quad elements over the bank and up the hill to near where the top of the tower now lies. I'd spent a few hours yesterday clearing out scrub trees to make a path for the haul and was clearing out all the debris just before Luis and William arrived. It was a tight fit getting the elements up the hill but it only took us about 20 minutes.

Fortunately, the rain held off today until now (noon) so I was able to make some great progress on the quad. I hauled up the other two tower sections and attached them. I put guys on the raising mast and ran the winch cable and a temporary rope for raising until the winch gets here. Next step will be to re-install the rotor and mast, put on the boom, and figure out how to re-attach the elements. Now that they are lying up there it looks to me as if there will be zero clearance with the big tree up there. I guess the worst case there is to trim the middle tower section as I'm not touching that tree.

I plan to start up WSPR on 30 meters here about 2200Z when the band begins to open up to Europe. If possible I'll let it run all night again (modulo any power glitches) and will be running 2W.

WSPR Overnight Run on 30M

2011-10-12T06:13:00.000-06:00

I left the K2 and laptop WSPRing to one another during the night on 30 meters through the rooftop vertical. The screen shot below is the last 12 hours. I think I will try this again some time but running 1W instead of 5W. It's fun to compare WSPR contacts over a long period while comparing predicted band conditions with VOAProp. I find very good alignment between the prognostication and the contacts map.

On WSPR 30M again this evening

2011-10-11T16:21:00.003-06:00

I don't seem to be hearing anyone and I'm not sure why that is. I'm upgrading my NTP sync program (Meinberg) to see if that is the problem. I'm really not seeing traces at all, however. As you can see in the map, my sig (5W today) is hitting W. Europe.

Later ... Yes, it appears my clock was off. After upgrading the Meinberg NTP daemon and re-booting I am now seeing some traces coming in, instead of it being a mostly one-way street out. Will leave it running this evening for those night owls in Europe.

WSPRing on 30 with vertical

2011-10-10T11:59:00.002-06:00

1 watt out with the vertical mounted on the center of the metal roof, which is grounded. Tuned up very easily (if you go too short, just slide a piece back out!). 30 meters doesn't look especially hot right now on WSPRNet, so I'm hoping that's why I am not being heard nor hearing anyone, so far.

Update 2020 UTC: I just started using Julian's VOACAP software and saw that my range on 30M was predicted to be very small in the early afternoon. It showed that it would open outward later in the afternoon and improve as night fell. And it did! I'm now hitting Europe. I notice that YV4GJN, using 5 watts, is also propagating into the Continent. I was tempted to increase power, but now glad I didn't and will let it continue to run until bedtime. 73!

Update 0023Z: Holy Cow! Just heard by VK6ZT. Good ears down under mate! This vertical officially wins my respect for DX-ability.

Vertical for 30 meters

2011-10-09T13:51:00.001-06:00

I was up early today, I'd had a good sleep, and was anticipating getting up a new antenna today. Moving the quad up the hill meant that I would have to forgo the trusty multi-band EDZ as the upper leg lies in the path of the quad. The EDZ won't be missed on 20 through 10 meters when the quad is ready, but I don't think that I can't live without 30 and 40 meters (below that I really don't care so much), so I had to come up with a plan.
In the end I decided to try out a vertical on the rooftop after all. DX Engineering's DXE-40VA-1TB looked tempting to me, especially since shipping via the U.S. postal service was a "mere" $110. That is a lot of bux, but the other verticals don't even have that option, relying on UPS, which more than doubles the shipping cost. I could almost swallow that price given that it is a commercial product with quality materials and comes with a tilt base, but it wouldn't give me 30 meters. Their 40/30 dual-bander costs significantly more because of the increased shipping.

So, home-brewing (which is more fun anyway!) was again my fallback option. I'm going with a 30 meter 1/4 wave vertical from aluminum tubing, and if I'm satisfied with it perhaps later I'll add a trap and some more length on top to grab 40 meters as well.

As is almost always the case (for HF), making the thing(s) that holds up the antenna is the most involved part of the operation. No exception here. I started this base yesterday and didn't finish it until today by early afternoon. It will attach to the roof peak and the feet are spaced so that the screws match the high points of the roofing sheets and the holding screws will bite into the underlying steel cross-members.

I used some fiberglass tube to space the element about 3 to 4 feet above the ground plane, because it was handy but also because I read that PVC tubing is not an ideal insulator for RF. An SO-239 is mounted to the side of the upright.

Getting it up on the roof today seems not to be an option, however. As you can see in the top photo it's a rainy day and that roof is slick if even the tiniest bit wet. I did get a chance to make sure the base fits the peak OK before the rain (uncharacteristically) started about 8 AM.

I spent the rest of the time on the easy part, which was fitting the aluminum tubes, starting with 3/4" down to 1/4". I wanted to start with 1", but the store doesn't carry 7/8" and I thought the fit too loose between 1" and 3/4" tube.

It's still rainy and foggy, no sign it will let up, but it's rather pleasant and quiet up here today. This kind of weather with gentle rain reminds me, as always, of a wet late summer/fall day in my native Oregon. Perfect afternoon for blogging, and working on my code speed.
73!

Reverse auction?

2011-10-03T08:28:00.000-06:00

I sometimes scan eBay for Heathkit items, I guess just to drool over things like a complete HW-9 set or to imagine re-acquiring my first (uncompleted) ham radio set, the HX-1681/HR-1680 twins. But I never open the wallet for them. My sense of nostalgia succumbs to my common sense. I usually direct my limited funds toward more modern and capable rigs, but I fully understand the draw of the older radios and especially ones you can actually repair yourself. I've put together several Heathkit kits, including the DMM pictured above. I still have it, I still use it.

So, I couldn't help noticing it on eBay, especially since the opening bid was $249.99! Wow! Yeah, I'd sell mine for that, hi! I put it in my Watch List to see if it could possibly fetch that price.

Of course, it didn't. I saw the seller re-list it but still at an astronomical price. The auctions were always 3 day auctions. The current listing, above, is about the sixth time it's been re-listed. Each time the price gets lowered. The listing has ended and not been re-listed, so I'm wondering if he or she has given up. Really, it's a nice little meter, but obviously eclipsed in functionality, size, and price by just about any low-end DMM these days, so who's not surprised that it can't even fetch 30 bux?

So, I'm wondering if this person understands what an auction is? They seem to have it exactly backwards. It's not to set the price as high as you can and then lower it until a bid occurs. In fact, after the first couple of listings anyone who actually wanted this meter would just wait for the next re-listing. A real waste of time. If they think this is such a hot item then why not just make a 30-day auction with starting bid 99 cents? Well, I hope they do sell the meter and to someone who appreciates it. I'm guessing they think that anything with the name Heathkit on it is solid gold. Live and learn.

Quad on the move

2011-10-02T16:43:00.000-06:00

Good progress was made this weekend on moving the quad up the hill. I brought the old girl down to the ground, dismantled the matching stubs harness (that's about 10 lbs. by itself), and pretty much stripped off everything attached to the sections.

The rotor and mast I left inside the top section. I've had a problem with the rotor, which is that the indicator needle drops out when passing through the 300-360 degree range. Not sure if the problem is in the rotor or the control unit, but sure would be nice to get it fixed while its all on the ground.

It was a welcome surprise that the elements slid off the boom rather easily and the tower sections themselves were not frozen. I feared I would have to dismantle the elements, too, but with a little help I think we can manage to haul them up to the new tower location intact.

The job I saved until today was building the extension to the base section that is embedded in concrete. The hardest part of that job was having to haul up a pick-up load of tools and running extension cords for both 110 and 220 VAC. I'd abandoned an extension "platform" I'd made the night before in lieu of directly extending the tubes and using flat iron on the sides to support the bottom tower section as it was in the old location. Finally, as the first rain drops of the afternoon fell, I finished up the primer and a top coat of silver paint. So, the first section is in place!

There's still a ton of work to be done. I need to guy the raising mast and install a winch and cable before I can start putting up the other sections and re-assembling the antenna itself (and putting in some lightning protection).

I'm going to do without the matching stub harness and remote antenna switch. Much simpler to feed all the loops with a single open/window/ladder line. That's going to require a little finesse to keep the feed line away from the tower and mast, but that shouldn't be too difficult.

I'm still pondering whether to run the rotor cable and feed line elevated or in conduit. Details!

Antenna fixin's

2011-09-23T17:20:00.000-06:00

Parents can be so embarrassing. Just ask my son Sean, who turns 13 tomorrow. On the way to town today to pick up groceries and mail I saw workmen replacing phone lines or reconfiguring them or something. Anyway, there was a big pile of clipped phone wire bundles. I stuck my head out the window and hollered at the guy on the ladder "Son sobrantes?" (leftovers?). Yes, and I could have them. I scooped it all up including the insulators and tensioners. Sean, slinking down in his seat slightly, is like "Dad, really?" and I'm like "Way!".

Besides a little green grunge here and there this is great antenna making material. I had a short piece before, which I measured to have about 200 ohms impedance with my old MFJ analyzer (there's a couple of pieces of mail under that pile, btw, including my new AA54!). It appears to be copper-clad steel, about 22 AWG. It's not likely to ever see more than 200 W, so that's fine. I think it's perfect to fill that gap between 50 and 300 ohm feedline and a prime candidate for making a Cobwebb Antenna!.

Alban finished up the concrete for the new quad/tower location above the house this morning. We ended up with one extra sack of cement. Lots of other projects where that can be used.

Sean wasted no time putting on his hand print and the number "13" into the still wet concrete, so we have a date marker for it. I made one mistake, which was to not anticipate that the retaining wall would be quite so high, so I will have to extend the tower tubes a bit in order to be able to fold it over. Not a big deal as that tube is thick and easy to weld. I may, in fact, make a triangular platform with hinge for the tower instead of just pinning the tower legs and using those as hinges.

Some decisions are cast in concrete

2011-09-22T14:30:00.001-06:00

See that antenna down there? Way down there. My trustworthy quad is stuck in an RF hole. It does have a nice view S to W but that's about it. It's taken me all this time to realize that what's really been chafing at my brain making it threadbare was that I miss my quad. (sniff)

I've busted a lot of pileups with that antenna up in Oregon, it works well, but maybe more importantly it looks cool! HI! It's down there because that's where I wanted the radio shack to be, not in the house. I still want a station down there, but gradually I've moved more gear up to the house station and I have to face facts. The quad is going to waste in its current location.

So, after an hour of squinting at my thumb at arm's length up on the hill above the house I found a place where I could fit it, just barely. No trees (except a dead one) need be cut and I can just slide the tower by the upper water tank, above which is a clear spot to land the business end of the contraption.

The test mast and VK2ABQ below it will clear when lowered by about a meter.

I'm duplicating the pad and mast for the quad just as in the tower's current location. The new mast just like the old one, is nearly 20 feet above ground and will have a hand-powered cable winch for lowering/raising the tower. Of course, I had to leave behind the old foundation frame, encased in concrete forever, and fabricate a new one.

I figured I would tackle this project sometime in the near future, but the wheels were set in motion yesterday afternoon when my neighbor Luis was working on his coffee next to our place with a small crew including his son, Alban. I told Alban I had some work for him and he said he could start today, ... at 6 AM. That meant I had to hustle. Alban is earnest and hard working. I swear he could lift an ox over his head unassisted.

It wasn't going to take him long to dig a big hole in the ground and I didn't even have the steel yet. The ferretería (building supply store) opened at 7 AM and there I was with my list. A 3x3" galvanized post, a 1" steel pipe, and a couple sizes of re-bar.

I managed to get the mast ready just as Alban finished the hole. We hauled that up and I left it to him to place it, level it, and secure it with rope. Meanwhile, I raced to get the foundation frame put together, which was a bit trickier. He got the mast in place well before I was finished, though, so I set him to work hauling up sand, gravel, and cement from the bodega up to the new antenna site. I finished the rest of the frame before he got that onerous task done. He complained (with a big smile) that each sack of sand he carried up there was one month off his life. ;^)

All the steel in place, it was my lunchtime, but Alban still had a couple more hours of work putting in the first concrete. He had to leave at two o'clock, but I'm sure he'll be back tomorrow bright and early to finish the pour, make the cap, and the small block retaining wall on the uphill side.

Over the next week or so while I'm waiting for the concrete to set up hard, I'll lower the quad and start the dismantling process. I do believe that when I re-install it I will feed it with window line, perhaps with a tuner at the base, maybe not. That would be a great simplification over the remote switch and 1/4 wave tuning stubs I have on it now. I'm sure both the quad and I will be much happier with it more in the clear and about 50 feet higher than it is now.

New Toy

2011-09-21T11:48:00.000-06:00

Not sure if I hinted at this new rig in previous posts, but, shhhhh, it's a surprise! Tamara just bought me the best Christmas present I could hope for, ... and she doesn't even know about it yet, hi! I was expecting KB7H to carry it down later this year when he was planning to come to CR for good, but he's hit a snag so we decided it was best to mail it down. Thus, it will be here in a week or two. Pictures of the actual rig I bought are here. It also comes with a fan kit, mic, and PSK audio cable.

I was lured by the Ten Tec Argonaut V since it first came out. I'm not always enamored of Ten Tec's rig styling, but this one is neat and compact and is really loaded for a QRP rig (20W out max). You can read all the details at Ten-Tec's site (the rig has been discontinued for a while, btw), but what attracted me to it were the top-line features: TXCO, full-coverage RX, 160-10M TX, CW, SSB, AM, FM, AFSK, rig control, PSK-ready, PBT (the one key feature I miss in a K2), DSP filtering 200Hz-3000Hz, and awesome QSK. The display and retro meter are icing on the cake.

The 1208 Transverter in matching cabinet can be added later to cover 6 meters SSB/CW. The Argonaut V is not exactly rare but they get snapped up very quickly in the online swapfests, which is how I got mine. I was looking through eHam for one, and finding only sold ones I went back to the classifieds home page. There it was! The only item listed since eHam keeps track of your visits and only lists new items. Seemed it was meant to be so I grabbed it. I think it's a bargain at 600 bux. It will likely become my main digi-modes rig. That's the plan right now anyway.

Sunday Visit to TI5KD

2011-09-20T18:07:00.001-06:00

TI5KD's Antenna Farm

Sunday felt like a much needed day off despite having to rise before 5 AM to deliver my XYL to the airport for her trip to see the Ukrainian side of the family. The trip north was uneventful, a beautiful sunny day with light traffic. After seeing Tamara off at passport control queue I met up with Peter, TI5KI, across from the terminal to follow him up to his Uncle Keko's (TI5KD) place less than 15 minutes away. I've exchanged numerous e-mails with Keko over the past few years and had heard a lot about his contest station, and this was going to be our first eyeball QSO. As you can see by the collage above he has a lot of metal up in the air over his modest sized plot of land (video version below the jump).

L-R: TI2/NA7U, TI5KD, TI5KI

After running some tests on the MFJ analyzer that I was selling to Peter, Keko gave me a tour of the facilities. Detached from the house is a 4-room bungalow with a full kitchen, two rooms set up for contest visitors and sleeping quarters. He can get hams visiting any time of the year, but mainly they are there for the six big 'tests of the year.

The contest position looks pretty sparse, but that's because the contesters always prefer to bring their own radio and computer gear. Keko provides the antennas, amps, and the TI5N call.

As you can see on the awards wall, this operating position has been used by some of the most skilled operators around. There are some QRP awards in there as well.

All of Keko's towers, by the way, were built by him using homemade jigs. In Costa Rica, where there are less than 300 hams (a fraction of which are on HF), one must make do as there are no ham-fests or decent classifieds. The tallest tower (if I remember correctly) is 130 feet tall. He still has stacks of these tower sections around so there is plenty of raw material for even more antennas, should the need arise!

I guess I was secretly pleased that Keko's own operating position seemed more chaotic than my own, hi! However, I certainly can not brag about my few modest awards compared to his wall and the proof is in the pudding as they say.

Keko's passion these days is 6 meters. He had many a tale to regale us with about going out portable into the mountains of Costa Rica to activate a new grid square and try better propagation locations. Once he set up on the northern side of Irazu Volcano and was able to compare his number of contacts with another 6-meter op he knows in the Central Valley. During the same opening Keko had about 130 contacts to the other op's 3 (three!).

We had lunch at a local deep-fried chicken place (delicious chicken there) and headed back to the station to tune a 70 cm J-Pole Peter had brought along.

We talked more radio, and I gave Keko a preview of WSPR on-line (he uses a different propagation reporter for 6 meters) and discussed a bit the digital modes such as PSK-31, which he has not yet tried.

Finally, after a bit of dickering, Peter and I came to agreement on price for my analyzer and a Kiwa BCB filter and then it was time to go. I dropped off Keko's daughter in Belén on my way home, promptly got lost for 40 minutes in the maze of the Central Valley, but finally found my way out. I hope to return again to visit in the near future with my son in tow, ready to take his U.S. ham exams (at least through General), so we'll have a 2nd op in the family. Keko knows the VECs who can make this happen.

Thanks Keko and Peter for being just awesome hosts, I hope to work you on the bands soon! 73.

Finally! Proof you can not have too many rigs!

2011-09-20T06:32:00.000-06:00

http://www.qrz.com/db/w9evt

Be sure to scroll down at George's QRZed page to see all the pictures!

Impressive to say the least. I was immediately reminded of my ex-neighbor in Oregon (Tom, K7PJT) who has a collection of old rigs to rival this one. He since moved to Hood River, Oregon where last we saw he was working on building a radio museum and super-shack. I wonder how that project is coming along? Tom and George are livin' the dream! Who loves radio more than these guys?

WSPRíng again on 20 M

2011-09-17T19:03:00.005-06:00

Another 'puter went belly up a few weeks ago, the one down in my shack-shack (the one that looks like a shack). I managed to resurrect an old Athlon 1GHz machine and was gradually re-populating the software. Tonight I put WSPR on it and got it working with the K2 down here. I set it up on 20 meters about 0000Z and continued adding other software pieces. One that I couldn't find, because I can't remember the name is one of the NTP sync apps. I tried a couple other ones but my DT seems to be on the border of not keeping sync.

I am using the quad down here and despite it being in a non-optimal location for Europe it was doing OK with my 2 watts out. Then I noticed that ZL2TCA was picking me up off the back so I swung it around for a 6-9 dB pickup. Nice to see the band open in that direction again. I also picked up 4X6IZ, which may be the first time I've "worked" Israel with WSPR. Fun times!

The Athlon box is really getting a workout with WSPR decoding. It takes it about 30 seconds after a receive cycle and the CPU is maxed out during that time. Poor little thing!

Today I sold via phone my MFJ-259 analyzer (pending inspection, but it works fine). The fellow is a relative of Keko Diez, TI5KD. The buyer, Peter, is going to meet me at the San José airport because it just so happens that I'm taking the XYL there for her month long trip to Ukraine and the U.S. Sunday morning. He said that Keko's place is only 10 minutes from there and as I have never been to Keko's we are going there afterwards.

If at our departure time of around 5 AM I remember to bring the camera then you can be sure there will be a post in that! You may remember a previous post here about Keko sponsoring this year's Youth DX Adventure. At that link you can see a grand picture of his antenna farm. Drool ....

QRQ

2011-09-13T20:06:00.001-06:00

Whilst on a break from working on moving my copy speed from sub-20 to 25 WPM I got caught up in a short thread on the Koch method of learning CW on the laconic FISTS reflector. My comments in support of G4XFC's proposal to do away with non-Koch-like learning methods led me over to his new Morse Crusade site. From there I followed a link to the still-in-progress site of N5DWI, John Westerlage, who is putting together a QRQ trainer (40+ WPM). Hurry up John! :)

On John's site is a list of QRQ articles, one of which I went to read, Tom Alderman's (W4BQF) post about the process of learning to converse in Morse at 70 WPM and higher.

This kind of stuff blows me away! I was especially surprised to see Tom's recommendation that one use a code reader when beginning to learn QRQ as it helps avoid the brain cramps that happen when you miss a letter/word and subsequently miss a lot more immediately following (I hate that!). Once you've gotten the hang of it the code reader is no longer necessary. I would have thought that to be like looking at a code sheet of dots and dashes while listening to slow Morse.

It's just about impossible to send Morse on paddles at the speeds these guys are going so they use keyboards. In fact, the really fast ones learn to use the Dvorak keyboard to keep up.

Could I ever hope to attain such a speed? Right now the short 75 WPM snippet on N5DWI's home page sounds like a blurry staccato to me. I guess if one did get to such seemingly astronomical code speeds the problem then becomes finding another QRQ op to talk with, hi hi!

73!

Going Vertical?

2011-09-11T13:50:00.000-06:00

I have been thinking of experimenting with a vertical antenna to observe the effect of a lower take-off angle on HF DXing from here in the Tropics. I suspect that my EDZ probably does no better than a 25 degree TO angle, if that.

Our house has a metal roof, connected to metal framing, connected to re-bar in the walls, which is connected to re-bar in the floor! Probably couldn't find a better ground plane than that. Seems like a big waste of good RF real estate.

A big concern, however, is lightning protection, since in the winter we get thunderstorms nearly every day and sometimes they pass over directly. It's been a wonder and a relief that so far we haven't received a direct hit. Putting up a long, narrow piece of metal directly over the center of the abode may be tempting fate, hi hi! Naturally, there are methods for mitigating this situation.

I'd like to hear in the comments or directly via e-mail any opinions you have in general about using vertical antennas (my experience is limited to mobile whips) and specifically about any particular verticals you have used, good and bad. I know, for instance, that Paul, PC4T once used the European version of a Comet CHA250, but it looks like that has disappeared from his QTH. Paul, did the HyEndFed replace that and do you use the HyEndFed in a vertical orientation?

Simplest first step to this project I guess is to mount the WUPV on the roof and send out some WSPR signals on that. That antenna is probably no better than 10-20% efficient, but it might tell me something. Next, I might try creating a simple 20 meter 1/4 wave vertical with some aluminum tubing and feeding it with ladder/window line to see if I can multi-band it. Probably the best solution is one of those 43' verticals with a remote tuner, but that's expensive and I'd really worry about any ATU located on my roof in this climate!

I'd love to read your thoughts ...

73!

Folded VK2ABQ (aka Square Hexbeam) Wrap-up

2011-09-08T07:00:00.000-06:00

As promised, I'm posting the 4nec2 modeling data for this folded, square Yagi thingee. You'll probably want to view the composite image in a separate tab in order to read the notations. The zip file on my Antenna Files page has separate, easy-to-read images.

The model is set for antenna elevation of 10 meters over average ground. Gain is about 10 dBi at a 25 degree TO angle and a F/B of 20+ at the low end of 20 meters. SWR at 14.05 MHz is just under 1.5:1 and if you look at the impedance chart you see that the reactance is about a third of the resistance and decreasing as frequency goes up. The reflection coefficient is -14, which is respectable. The beamwidth is wide, and that's OK. In practice I'm not seeing the promised F/B, but it may just be a matter of tweaking the reflector some. Haven't tried it yet, and may not bother as high F/B is not a particular advantage at my QTH.

I feel fortunate that this remarkably simple modification to the existing antenna worked out so well all the way around. Lucky.

By the way, I decided to spring for a RigExpert AA-54 analyzer and I would certainly like to do some sweeps on this antenna and post about that in a few to several weeks. Should be interesting to see how close it matches to the computer model. I wonder whether the AA-54 can be used to shorten the time for tuning the F/B ratio?

Evening's activity with the "F-VK2"

2011-09-05T19:30:00.001-06:00

F-VK2?? Doesn't that sound mysterious and techy (i.e. geeky)? Or how about F-square? Still better than Folded VK2ABQ or Square Hexbeam, don't you think? :^)

Anyway, I put the antenna to some practical use tonight, first on CW then PSK31/63. I proved to myself decisively that this antenna is quite a useful complement to the EDZ. I started off the new antenna with V02NS, not such a stretch, then turned the beam towards Europe. Along came UT5FB/MM off the coast of Brazil, sideways to the beam. I switched to the EDZ and the signal came up apprciably. Then I worked a QRP station in Slovenia (I think that's a new one for me), S52R.

After dinner I went to PSK31, and worked OH on the EDZ (due North is its best direction). I saw CX2SC calling CQ and swung the beam SE to South America. The difference on the waterfall was quite noticeable. He'd missed my first call before I swung the beam, but heard me after that and gave me 599 for my 20W. Then I got a call from N9NTC off the back of the beam. On my next turn with him I switched to the EDZ and he noticed the rise in signal as I did his. Finally, worked W0GLB with PSK63, a mode I'm surprised I don't see more on the waterfall, btw.

It's nice to have another tool at hand. The new antenna seems to be doing its job as well as can be expected. The plan is to try to reach across the Pacific with it in the coming evenings as long as the band (and thunderstorms) cooperate. I also need to figure out how to synch the rotor to the control properly as I always seem to be off 30 or 45 degrees and it's a pain to have to go outside to visually confirm its direction. Someday I'll buy a real rotor, hi!

73!

The Olden Days

2011-09-04T17:46:00.000-06:00

Whilst giving the radio shack a good cleaning I ran across these two photos tucked in a book of one of my early stations, circa 1997, I think. My first real radio was a Drake TR-3, but that didn't last long as I was a CW op and the TR-3 was a SSB rig, no filters.

I then got into some other Drake gear, see the 2-C, 2-NT, and 2-CQ on the bottom shelf complete with a Heathkit HG-10 VFO so I could move around the bands. I even had a "spare" 2-C/2-NT on the top shelf. Never shudda sold those! I eventually acquired a TR-7, which was a great rig.

I went through a long Ten-Tec phase. The Triton IV (with digital VFO readout on top), the Century 21, and the tuner were just the start. I think my favorite of those string of TT rigs was the Omni-D I got not long after these photos were taken. I still lust after a C-22 or a Delta II, but I manage to keep myself in check when I see them up for sale, hi. For a long time I also had a Ten Tec Scout and operated it mobile CW for quite a while. I used it to blitz my way to No. 6 for the FISTS Mobile CW award as soon as they started that one. Those were the days!

On WSPR with mod'd VK2ABQ (cont.)

2011-09-03T17:27:00.000-06:00

The "folded" VK2ABQ definitely has some gain and F/B, though nothing one could call spectacular. I ran WSPR on it from about 10AM to 4:30PM local time (1600Z-2230Z). Up until about 2000Z I had it pointed due north at the States and all my WSPR contacts were from there, over the entire continent. As soon as I swung it 45 degrees east I picked up G4DZW, followed a couple of cycles later by DL2ZQ and ON7KB. Small sample, sure, but I do think it's a directive antenna. I continued picking up European stations after that and lost nearly all stations on the U.S. West Coast. Conversely, when I turned the antenna 180 degrees from Europe. I was still picking up Europe off the back, but the difference in signal levels was about 5 to 8 dB (avg. 6.5 dB). I didn't hear anyone in VK/ZL lands and they didn't hear me.

After switching off WSPR I pointed the modified VK2ABQ due north, exactly in line with my EDZ and did A/B comparisons on strong signals from the States. I could hear a difference, but it was really without distinction. So, based on that we could say the gain (on receive) was equal, about 3-4 dB. Pointing the beam 180 degrees out there was a solid 1+ S-unit difference between the two, which would confirm the WSPR observations.

BTW, I'm feeding the beam with RG-8/U, so there may be about .5 dB loss in the nearly 100 feet of that, but the SWR is about 1.2-1.4, so probably negligible. I guess in summary it's acting like a theoretical ordinary VK2ABQ would act, but with at least some construction and impedance advantages. I'll give it a whirl on PSK31 either later tonight or tomorrow.

73!

On WSPR with mod'd VK2ABQ

2011-09-03T11:33:00.001-06:00

I started WSPR on 20 meters about 10:34 AM local time (1634Z) at 2 watts. Antenna is pointed due north and the pattern is strictly with the U.S. (and one Venezuelan station) so far. Going to run into town and see if I can find some cable to extend the rotor control line so that I can turn the antenna towards Europe later today to see if there is any noticeable result.

BTW, I have a novice SSB question. I set my K2 to 2 watts output, but then adjust the mic drive so that I'm putting out 1 watt on the meter, so as to not over-modulate. Is it still correct to list my signal as 33 (2W) or is it considered 1W?

73.

Name that antenna!

2011-09-02T19:26:00.002-06:00

Just in time for the 3-day U.S. Labor Day weekend, I have the modification finished to my VK2ABQ, now replete with a rotor and on the new, sturdier mast. There was no time to spare today as the rain (and thunder!) swept in as I was relaxing on the balcony having just run the coax to the second floor and having given a last SWR check on the MFJ-259.

Though, by all means, we must give deference to Fred Canton, VK2ABQ, for coming up with the fundamental design, I wish I could name this something else besides a [some adjective]-VK2ABQ, which is rather awkward at best. Why wasn't it named the Canton Antenna in the first place? Hmm?

Actually, this design is probably more closely related to the hexbeam, which is really where I got my inspiration, specifically the G3TXQ hexbeam with its "perimeter reflector" design that makes the original back-to-back 'M's version of the hexbeam more broad-banded. In fact, if you dig into G3TXQ's incredibly informative site you'll run across a diagram of the very design I have here, though he only refers to it in passing as "S2", one of many configurations in this family of antennas. I honestly don't remember seeing that diagram before concocting my design, but you know what they say about great minds! :)

I'd pondered the hexbeam many times over the years. It's a compelling, compact design. Here I was again, thinking about basically throwing away the VK2ABQ, since I'd have to re-do the hub and find two more spreaders. I hardly felt that ambitious, however. Alternatively, I already had the "morphed" VK2ABQ in my pocket, but the diamond-shaped yagi design looked tricky on its own, let alone the 17 meter open-sleeve and I was still feeling skittish from the failed 20 meter phased beam. So, I took a different tack of trying to "square the hex" as it were.

The diagram at the top of this post is what I came up with and when I modeled it I was pleasantly surprised. In summary, these are what I saw as the advantages:

- Simple change. This was an easy mod to make as I didn't have to move the corners of the original VK2ABQ. I only had to disconnect the loop, bring the center of the driver to the center post and add some length to the sides. The reflector stayed put, I only had to add some wire to each end. Note that the driver is slightly longer than the reflector.
- Better gain. 10 dBi at the bottom end of 20 meters.
- Better F/B. The original VK2ABQ can produce about 12 dB of F/B, but this one promises 20+ dB.
- 50 ohm feedpoint. It really surprised me that I got this thrown in for free. The nominal feedpoint impedance for a standard VK2ABQ is 160 ohms. There is some reactance, but as it's a fraction of the resistance it can be dealt with easily.
- More broad-banded. The antenna tunes very flat and the reactance stays low across 20 meters. Gain tapers off very slowly, F/B tapers moderately. The gap distance between the ends of the elements appears to be very non-critical.
- Improved structure. The "5th leg" of a VK2ABQ, which mine didn't have, is usually a spar on one side to support the feed-line connection and balun, if any. Since the feedpoint is now in the center that spar is unnecessary.

One of the great advantages of the VK2ABQ over its cousin, the Moxon, is that it's trivial to multi-band due to its symmetry. Multi-banding the design I now have seems possible as 4nec2 shows, but the devil may be in the details. That's for another day.

Below are photos of the new mast and the antenna in place. I hope to use the weekend to put theory to the test when the lightning isn't crashing. I think WSPR would be a great way to get an inkling of its behavior. I am 20 feet short on the rotor control cable, so will have to scrounge that up to see how the directivity is. In an upcoming post I'll discuss the modeled characteristics of this whatever-you-want-to-call-it antenna are, but you can preview all of it wrapped in a zip file on the Antenna Files page.

Mast and antenna in the ground position

Top of the mast folds to keep the antenna horizontal

Counterweights on the bottom end of the mast

The hinge, latch, and adjustable stop

TV rotor and a refurbished ferrite core balun

I use this jump-start unit to run the winch (it's also great for portable QRP operations!)

Shortened Yagi Follow-up (20 meters)

2011-09-01T16:29:00.000-06:00

When I left the KJ5VW-based shortened Yagi, I only published the 17 meter results. I'd meant to do a quick Part II and show the results for 20 meters as well, but spaced it out. So, here they are now. The full set of screen shots and the NEC file are already on the Antenna Files page.

Short and sweet, with the 20 meter tails added to the 17 meter version, there's approximately 10 dBi gain at 14 MHz with a moderate 9+ dB F/B. The 50 ohm SWR starts off high, about 4:1, but drops rapidly and the reactive component is a fraction of the resistive, so it's not a terrible tune. Since the antenna is designed to be portable, which means the feed-line will be short (30 feet), I'm not overly concerned with the SWR loss. I think it's a good trade-off for the portability you get. Once I'm done messing with the current modification of my VK2ABQ and test it out, I will probably put this Yagi on the mast and run it through the paces as well. The results will be anecdotal, of course, as I really don't have the instruments to accurately measure gain and F/B here.

Cooking with Koch

2011-08-29T11:51:00.000-06:00

Incremental progress is being made on the new antenna mast, but it's probably still a couple days away from completion. Farm chores and rain have kept me from spending much time on that project. It is mounted in the base, though, so it's on the home stretch.

I've decided I'm long overdue for a boost in my CW speed so I've started off-line training with a goal to bring up my copy speed to a solid 25 WPM. 20 WPM seems to have been my barrier and if I'm not active for long periods that falls back to about 16-17 WPM. I've downloaded Ray Goff's (G4FON) CW Trainer V9, to aid my quest.

Ray's program is concise but full featured and has a lot of icing to spread around. I'm not yet using the "real-life" QSO enhancements the program offers, just the vanilla, straightforward Koch method of starting with 2 letters and adding 1 at a time as you reach 90% proficiency with the current set. Although Ray recommends that you write the letters so that you can score yourself, I don't think that's really practical much above 20 WPM. I suppose you could do it with a keyboard, but I haven't tried that yet. For now I'm just relying on my internal sense of how much I'm comprehending to judge when it's time to add a new letter. I start a session with 30 WPM and then after two or three 5-minute rounds crank the speed back down to 25 WPM, which then doesn't sound so fast at all! It's like using one of those weighted donuts on your bat when you're in the on-deck circle (apologies to those for whom baseball is a foreign mystery, hi).

I found when I was first learning the Code that the Koch method provided the most progress in the shortest amount of time, for me. I modified it somewhat because of its natural characteristic of having you spend a larger percentage of your learning time on letters you already pretty much know. I did that manually by breaking up the letter set into about 6 subsets of 6 or 7 characters each. I'd learn a whole subset, then set those aside and start fresh with a new subset. Gradually, I'd then merge the sets together. Ray's program has a checkbox on the Setup page that allows you to give greater weight to the newest letters, which accomplishes much the same thing.

Of course, there are lots of ways to learn Morse, and lots of different learning styles. Personally, I like Koch, but I wouldn't recommend it to the exclusion of other methods. In fact, I think it's a very good idea to mix different methods in one's Code studies so as to avoid those dreaded plateaus.

73!

Antenna Test Mast

2011-08-23T13:50:00.002-06:00

Been busy!

As I mentioned in my last post, I'd decided to finally make some much needed modifications to the tilt-down mast up by the house, which currently supports the VK2ABQ. Version 1 was a bit makeshift, bolts and lightweight mast, with a distinctive bend when bringing down the antenna to ground level.

Version 2 features some real steel! The mast, 20' long, is 5 mm thick 1.5" nominal rolled pipe. Something you can really sink a welding rod into.

Like version 1, this is going to be a tilt-down plus fold-up at the end arrangement, which brings the antenna down horizontal to about a 5 foot working height. I devised a rather more robust hinge and latch arrangement along with a rod that will double as guide and support when the mast is tilted over. All will be revealed when I get it all polished and painted and on the support.

I'm doubling up the support posts as well to carry the extra weight of the mast plus a small rotator. That should help make the whole contraption stabler. An electric winch is used for both lowering and raising. The winch has a remote control, which is ever so handy. I made sure to put it in a "safe place". Unfortunately, I didn't write down where that was exactly and probably would have lost the note anyway. So, there may be a small delay if I have to open the case and install a manual switch.

I plan to use the new mast as an antenna test-bed for any kind of fits-on-a-mast antenna design such as the VK2ABQ or the new portable 20-meter beam. It will lift an antenna to about 24' off the ground, but the effective near-field height is much more than that since the surrounding ground on 3 sides slopes away sharply and deeply. Especially due North.

You might think the 20 meter beam should be the first test candidate, but actually, during the rainy down times I tried a different, simpler mod in 4nec2 for the VK2ABQ than I'd posted about previously that looks very promising. So, that mod I'll likely try out first. But, that is for another day and another post. 73!

20 meter phased beam 1, Casey 0

2011-08-12T17:12:00.000-06:00

That shortened phased beam that you've been reading too much of lately? Finally whupped me! I was close, but no cigar. In the ultimate last-ditch push I jettisoned the Guanella balun, tried different lengths of phasing line, and I felt I was getting close, but resonance was still out of reach, at least without a bagful of reactance and that just wouldn't do. I was able to tune out the reactance with a parallel capacitive stub using some scrap coax, but 4nec2 told me that I had to kiss about 2dB of gain goodbye if I did that.

So, it was time to do some head scratching and RF soul searching. What could I salvage? I removed the phasing line and then did what I should have done in the first place - 20/20 hindsight being the better part of valor -, which was to utilize the neglected 4nec2 Optimizer!

The Optimizer is a really fun sub-program in 4nec2 that, once your design is close, lets you select various aspects of your design (usually wire length), weight the characteristics most important to you (e.g., SWR, Gain, F/B, ...) and then you let it rip. It chugs away for several to many iterations after which you can accept the changes or tell it to keep going. Once it's done it's a one-button click to add its changes to your NEC file. I didn't use it on the phased design as I thought I'd probably tried every permutation already and I was getting sick of that design anyway.

Thus, I put the optimizer to work on the original KJ5VW design. I'd already found manually that moving the position of the coils or changing their values was more or less counterproductive so I left those parameters be. I was also trying to overcome a limitation of the original design, which was that the Three Sirens of antenna design, low SWR, high gain, and high F/B didn't seem to line up well at any frequency.

Well, the optimizer did the trick, increased the gain and lined it up pretty well with F/B and reasonable SWR (though not the lowest). I end up with a nice 25 degree TO angle, over 11 dB gain and narrow bandwidth along with not too shabby F/B of 15 dB. I can live with that!

After taking these data down to the shack and tuning up 17 meters on a now much more reasonably behaved antenna, I set to work on the 20 meter tails. Overall, on 17 meters the antenna is about 13.5 feet wide (4.11 meters) and 16.75 feet wide on 20 meters (5.1 meters). Other than the specific element lengths the only notable difference between this design and the original is that the reflector is about 3 to 4 inches longer, whereas the elements are equal in the original. Also, the separation of the elements is 2 feet closer in my version.

You can see how I finally cured the element droop, by adding a short brace to each end to which I could strap the element support poles.

Electrically, after removing the capacitance stub and Guanella balun I only had to add a jumper to connect the reflector elements.

I also strengthened the center support that slips over the mast (not pictured).

The weight I don't know exactly but I'd be very surprised if it was even close to 10 lbs., so it's very easy to haul around if there are no obstructions. Breakdown and re-assembly should not be difficult, but I'll know more once I set this up on an outing.

It hasn't yet been put to an authentic field test as the place on the property where I constructed it is in an RF "hole", so even though I was able to A/B it with the quad, the signals they were both receiving were coming in at a high angle, so real F/B remains to be seen. After I make some deferred mods to my mast up by the house I will mount it there with a rotator to see how it performs in the clear.

By the way, starting with this antenna I will put together a ZIP file of pictures, 4nec2 screens, and the NEC file on my Antennas Page instead of just the NEC file.

73!

Announcing the WUPV antenna!

2011-08-05T08:59:00.000-06:00

This antenna may easily qualify for World's Ugliest Portable Vertical, IMHO. I created it during the "in-between" times when I wasn't tinkering with the 20M beam, which has become a PITA Royale, and I don't mean pocket bread! Anyway, this junk drawer base-loaded vertical tunes 10 through 30 meters and should make a decent antenna for radio outings, especially by the sea.

The coil is 26 turns of #14 solid wire wound on a 2" PVC form. I soldered on taps for each of the bands, adding and removing them as I completed the tuning process. It uses three 8' elevated radials. The whip is another of my 10' collapsible fishing rods with #14 wire strapped to it for stiffness. I have a splice in the whip wire at 8'. When disconnected I can then tune 10 and 12 meters easily. Initially, when I connected the tap at the final position (approx. 26 uH) I was able to tune 40 meters as well, but along the way something changed, I know not what, and I lost 40 meter. Not a big deal for daytime operation. It all sits on top of a little metal stand that I can push into the ground or sand.

At least that antenna works! The beam, so far, has been impossible to tune for 20 meters and the limitations of my MFJ 259 make it very difficult to tell why. I have spent hours trying to tune out the reactance with coax stubs and various other tricks, but it refuses to cooperate.

Since the 259 doesn't let me see the reactance, let alone sweep either side of the (supposed) resonance point it has been a black box affair and a little bit ~~frustrating~~, err ... challenging. You can usually tell how deep I'm into a project by the state of my workbench, which has nearly approached its entropic limit (but believe me it can get messier!).

I decided I badly needed to step back and take a break from the beam, which was partly why I was working on the vertical in parallel. I'd been neglecting my farming duties as well, so yesterday I spent several hours cutting brush and also finishing up Sean's Science Fair project for school (due today). We made a couple of catapults; the Trebuchet pictured below, and a bungie version of a Mangonel. I'll post more pics and a write-up post-Fair on A Dull Roar later.

Let's not count out the beam quite yet, however. Last night I did some more work on the model (I need to update the version on the download page) and discovered I can probably get some more reasonable behavior out of it by playing with the length of the phasing line. I'm also going to make a backwards step and just tune the driven element to make sure I'm not totally missing something fundamental.

Meanwhile, I can only dream about getting a RigExpert AA-54, which would be a tool that would save me a lot of time on this project or the next by allowing me to see what's really going on with the antenna up close and personal.

73!

I think I'll name my first girl child Guanella. ;^)

2011-08-01T15:06:00.000-06:00

Welcome to August!

The picture is the end result of my efforts on the 20 meter beam today, a 1:9 Guanella current balun with provision for additional parallel capacitance.

Having slept on it I felt more sure today than yesterday that I was probably going to get nowhere with the beam by simply trimming the elements until I'd taken care of the low impedance and moderate reactance shown by 4nec2 for this antenna. I'd made a step in that direction when I added that 27' of 300 ohm line. I didn't just pull that number out of the air, but used the 1:1 matching sub-program built in to 4nec2.

That sub-program will calculate a match from the characteristic (complex) impedance of the antenna to whatever feedline impedance you have chosen for the model. It provides values for either a network or a stub match. In the former you can choose among L-C, T-Match, or Pi-Match (hi or lo pass). In the latter you can select Series Section, Parallel or Series matching stub and whatever kind of transmission line you want for the matching section(s). I'd chosen a Parallel stub with 300 ohm line. L1 was the 27' of feed line I've been using. The parallel stub was to be about 5" shorted, but inserting that threw everything off so I went with just the long line.

I was getting nowhere fast, however, trying to match 20 meters and decided to do away with the feed line section and start working at the antenna terminals directly. First I wound a single-core 1:4 Guanella balun, which helped. I saw a lot of frequency dependent variance using a dummy load so then went to a two-core version. On the antenna I could see that it was helping but I was still hampered by the inductive reactance that my puny MFJ-259 really can't measure nor deal with.

So, I added both a coax stub (about 90 pF) and then an air variable in parallel to remove some of that reactance so I could see the underlying antenna resistance. Better, but the impedance is so low I had to add another core to the balun to get a 1:9 transformation. Now things are making more sense and with about 130 pF I tune out the reactance at 20 meters.

The rain started about then so I dismantled my jury-rigged test set up, put the antenna under cover and spent the next couple of hours putting together the pictured box (it was a great opportunity to use my new toy, too, a variable heat glue gun!). In addition to the jacks for the coax stub there is a small variable capacitor in parallel and accessible from one side for fine tuning (20-60 pF). Three T130 cores add considerable weight though, but what are you gonna do? Weather willing I should be able to re-start the tuning process and at a higher elevation.

Snip, snip, ... ooops!

2011-07-31T11:04:00.000-06:00

Clearly, I didn't solve the drooping elements problem. In fact, it's worse, hi!

Stylish, don't you think? :)

I re-worked the end element holders by using larger PVC tees and a much tighter fitting sleeve from some flexible PVC tubing (which I'd brought from the States for a different purpose and which you'd never find here). The elements were OK until I put on the coils and wire. Just means that I have to add a small mast support at each end, which I was inclined to do anyway despite adding complexity to the implementation.

I frittered away most of yesterday's sunny morning doing other stuff and by the time I got to the antenna I had just enough time left to get the 17 meter elements on and start tuning and trimming. I'd made the elements about a foot or so longer than the software told me and sure enough it was too long, at about 17.120 MHz with an SWR around 2:1. I figured resonance would rise once on the mast and it did by about 400 KHz.

I don't know why, but nearly every time that I trim an antenna I think of it as a linear process when I know darn well that SWR is never linear (and if it were you have other problems with your antenna). So, long story short, I trimmed off about 3 inches too much in one whack and had a resonant freq of 18.500 before I knew it. The basic design is, of course, meant for 20 meters so you can imagine how steep the dip is on 17 meters, so I just overshot by a mile.

I soldered back on the 3 inches and it seems close now, but the rain was already starting so I haven't been able to test it on the mast yet. One surprise was that it looks like when the 20 meter extensions are off that I'll get 12 meters for free in addition to 17 meters. Low SWR starts well below 24.89, but 2:1 or better extends well beyond the upper end of 12M. Pleasant surprise!

Today is overcast but looks like I have at least a couple of hours of dry, so off to the shack to see if I can finish up the tuning on 17M and get 20M tuned, ... and with luck, see if there is any F/B on 20 worth a hoot. Oh, by the way, the ending length for the 17 meter elements? Within an inch of what 4nec2 predicted! Here in Costa Rica we call that Pura Vida!!

73

Restarting the 20 meter beam

2011-07-30T09:41:00.001-06:00

I was able to test out the beam (neé KJ5VW short yagi) this week a bit. Using a bike stand I have I rotated it to a vertical orientation (first driven element above the second) and ran 27 feet of 300 ohm flat line to the SWR analyzer (the reason for that length will be revealed later). With just a little tweaking to the length of the first element I was able to get a match within the 20M band, though about 200 KHz too high. I experimented with a hairpin match and small coils across the feed point, which really didn't make much difference. At any rate, I felt this was close enough that there was promise in this design.

Yesterday was grey and drizzly, not really amenable to putting the beam up on the mast, so instead I camped out with the antenna in the carport of the radio shack and worked on improving its mechanical and electrical aspects. Some modeling the night before showed me that if I replaced the 24 AWG speaker wire with solid 14 AWG (of which I have hundreds of feet) and raised the value of the coils to where they should have been in the first place (9 uH) that I could shorten the elements by about 5 feet overall. So, starting with new coils, I spent most of yesterday cutting new elements, replacing the fahnestock clips with machine bolts and beefing up the element supports to reduce the sag. Today looks sunny and dry so I'm hoping to get the structure up in the air for some more real-world testing. Stay tuned!

73!

P.S. Bas, PE4BAS, got the stamps. Thanks Bas!

Free DX Stamps

2011-07-27T10:35:00.000-06:00

I have been taking a few days off from the antenna building in order to accomplish a badly needed clean-up and re-org of my radio shack. I also had a hard disk crash that took several sessions at the computer over the last few days to recover from.

Whilst cleaning the shack I came across a small stash of DX postage stamps from the days when I would send an SASE with stamps from the op's country in order to motivate a quick return of the QSL card (90+% return rate with this method).

I don't need them anymore and if anyone reading this blog wants them, send me your address and I'll send them to you, first come, first serve. There are packets for Spain, Singapore, Germany, China, Japan (3), Russia, Denmark, UK (2), Guatemala, Chile, and a handful for Ukraine. Undoubtedly, postage rates have gone up in those countries so you probably have to add another stamp or two, but if you use the SASE method for direct QSLs then these should save you some money. These were all ordered from William Plum, by the way. I don't think he has a web site, but you can e-mail him for a price list or sample kit.

If no one here wants them in a week or so then I'll put them up on one of the ham radio classified sites.

Empirical Engineering

2011-07-24T07:30:00.001-06:00

Although I've been able to work on the portable antenna idea one or a few hours a day this past week, it feels like my progress is very slow. Nearly all the time has been spent on developing a portable mast to get the 20 meter phased beam up to as near 30' as possible. It's been an adventure in what I'll dub "empirical engineering"!

You may recall I aborted the first attempt at building a mast from some 1" fiberglass tubing of which I have a bunch, but I couldn't get the joints to be tight enough that there wasn't far too much sag in even 20 feet of that assembly. I don't know of any local (and by local I mean as far away as San José) source for different sizes of fiberglass tubing that I could possibly nest, so that option was out (Max Gain has some nice kits for this, but shipping is prohibitive to here).

Going with the "what's at hand" philosophy I thought I'd try thin-wall conduit (EMT), so I picked up a set of one each of 10 foot tubes from 1-1/4" down to 1/2" inch. More weight and unknown flex strength. Because of the additional weight I first worked on the base, pictured above. The rods are stakes to anchor the base, hopefully long enough to give a good grip even in sand. I used three sections, 1" to 1/2", guyed at the top of the 3/4" section.

With these three nesting tubes I was able to get the antenna into the air, but it was clearly overly flexible and finally the 3/4" tube developed a bend. The base itself worked well, it was a piece of cake to walk the mast up from one end, but the center tube and axis was too weak and developed a bend and crack in one of the welds.

Round three: First I beefed up the center section of the base by using a sturdier design involving a heavy duty hinge and a short section of 1-1/2" galvanized water pipe. Next I went one step up on the tubing schedule, starting with the 1-1/4" section at the bottom and used shorter sections. Even though the mast was heavier it was much more rigid and still easy to walk up to vertical.

The antenna itself, even fully extended (each element is about 20' long) is easily handled with just one hand, it is so light. So, with one hand I lift up the end of the mast, slide on the boom and then walk it up. The base pivots up to vertical at which point it hits a stop and I throw a makeshift latch across the front so it's secure.

There are a few mechanical deficiencies in the antenna itself having to do with the wire connections that I'll correct this week and then, I hope, I'll be able to start working on its electrical characteristics and see how it listens and if I can coax some F/B out of it. I also want to experiment with the mast itself as a vertical antenna to see if it can tune within a ham band.

73!

Youth DX Adventure from Costa Rica

2011-07-20T09:17:00.001-06:00

Starting last year (photo of team from 2010 above), "Keko" Diez, TI5KD, has hosted a Youth DX Adventure where 6 kids get to come down and "be the DX" from his formidable station, TI5N, up in Alajuela (about 4 hours drive from here). The 2011 YDXA is July 21st-25th. As luck would have it I was on PSK31 last night and had a chat with Mike, KD0BNO, who is one of the adult team leaders bringing the kids down tomorrow. I would have forgotten about it otherwise.

There's a nice write-up on the ARRL site about last year's adventure. All the kids will be signing TI5/<home call>, so give a listen for them. Below is a picture of TI5N's antenna farm. If they can't get some QSOs with that kind of equipment at hand, they aren't hardly trying!

Not letting go quite yet ...

2011-07-17T13:07:00.000-06:00

Leaving behind that 20 M shortened Yagi when I ran into modeling issues really didn't sit well with me. Admittedly, I don't have much experience in modeling Yagis, but it surprised me that the model seemed so out of kilter. I couldn't let it go, it was bugging me when I went to sleep and I was thinking about it upon waking. I looked at other designs (e.g., the shortened Moxon), but kept coming back to the Yagi, convinced I could do something with it.

I made two "breakthroughs" as I persisted in playing with the parameters at hand. Things first started coming together when I simply made both elements identical. Previously, I'd made the assumption that the wire portions of the reflector had to be 5%+/- longer than the driven element. When I made them equal, things improved. Still, however, SWR-F/B-Gain were not lining up well. I researched other antennas, in particular, the Field Day Special by Roy Lewallen, W7EL, which uses two folded dipole elements connected by a phase line. Of course, the shortened Yagi wasn't the same antenna, but what the heck, I put in a crossed phase line of 50 ohm impedance. Bingo! Things started looking up.

I'm going to reserve the details of my modeling to a following post, since I leaped before looking last time and I don't want to do that again. This past week I have been both tweaking the model and continuing the mechanical construction of the antenna itself so that I can test it. It seems to have some remarkable characteristics including very healthy gain and F/B ratio, but one significant drawback, a very low feed impedance. I think I have a solution for the latter. The thing that is slowing me down at the moment is making a suitable mast to get this thing up at least 30 feet. My first attempt using some on-hand fiberglass poles was a complete failure. I'm going to pursue a push-up mast now, but need to get some materials tomorrow at the hardware store.

Stay tuned!

Abandoning the 20 M Portable Yagi

2011-07-12T15:36:00.000-06:00

I felt the single element, fishing pole dipole was working as expected (despite the low value coils) and modeling showed it would work well, full gain of a dipole, about 500 KHz 2:1 SWR bandwidth, all well and good. Next I was to make a second element, same coils, but longer wire elements to act as a reflector. I wanted to make the boom as short as possible for stability reasons and so began modeling in 4nec2.

It was disappointing to see that the design was, in a word, "unstable". Regardless of the boom spacing or adjusting wire lengths or even the inductor values I could never come up with a sweep that didn't make me feel that this was going to be an antenna difficult to tune and use. Bandwidth was very sharp and narrow and best gain and F/B wasn't even close to a reasonable SWR, unless I were to feed it with window line (maybe). Thus, I think it better to abort mission while I'm ahead and accept the 20/17 meter dipole as is, which is still quite a useful field antenna. Instead I'm going to be investigating the possibility of a scaled down version of W7XA's Mini-Moxon design for 40 meters.

73!

P.S. Recalling my earlier post about improving the RST signal reporting system: in my recent studies I ran across a previous article on this topic by SK L.B. Cebik, which covers more history and technical aspects. I was only a little disappointed that he doesn't express a personal preference there.

Portable 20M yagi update

2011-07-11T12:22:00.000-06:00

There's good news and bad (but not really bad) news. Which do you want first?

I put together the pieces of the driven element, hoisted it to about 12 feet on a painter's pole and attached the MFJ-259 to it. Tunes almost perfectly ... for 17 meters! I knew then that I'd screwed up with the values of the coils and went back to the "drawing board", i.e. 4nec2 to see what went wrong. Sure enough, 4nec2's model was almost spot on with reality. The software is free, but not delusional.

So, I re-visited K7MEM's site and it also jived with reality, which meant somewhere along the way I made a dumb mistake. My best guess is that I put in the wrong length for the wires in the K7MEM calculator. For the total length I had of 16 feet the coils should have been about 10 uH.

I added some "tails" to each end of the element and pruned to resonance on the low end of 20 meters. The tails are just under 3 feet long and with the fishing poles fully extended I have dangly pieces about 9" long on each end. I think that is acceptable. Instead of making a 20 meter yagi that I could convert to 17 meters I will do it the other way around. How's that for adaptability? :)

I am disappointed in the amount of sag I have in the elements, however. As they are I have a nice inverted vee with about a 140 degree angle. So, clearly I'm going to need some support guys from the boom and the boom is what I will work on next.

A start on the 20M portable yagi

2011-07-10T19:25:00.000-06:00

My recent portable operation inspired me to re-visit the KJ5VW mini-yagi design and actually do something about it. So, this weekend I gathered various parts laying around the shack and dug into the project. My main goals are reasonably light weight and fits in a small space (e.g. backpack) when disassembled. Also, assembly has to be easy and the antenna itself easily modified. As an afterthought, I'm hoping I can make it work on 17 meters as well by bypassing the coils.

First up were the mid-element coils. KJ5VW's instructions, as far as I can tell, don't specify the exact inductance of the coils he used, though the coil dimensions are explicit. The value of 4.5 uH I took from the shortened dipole calculator of K7MEM. I may regret that value as I modeled it in 4nec2 after I wound the coils and the value seems low according to that software. We shall soon see.

The coils are about 23 turns of #22 enameled wire on 1/2" CPVC tubing (used for hot water supplies). I chose this form size mostly because they slide snugly over the fishing poles at about the mid-point. I measured the inductance of each coil and they average 4.46 uH +/- .1 uH. I spread a waterproof glue over the outside of the wire to hold the coils in place and then packaged them in transparent heat shrink tubing.

The element wire comes from splitting ordinary speaker wire, 24 AWG. They are soldered to the coils and the ends are tinned. I plan to slide the coils on the extended fiberglass fishing poles and clip the wires on each side of the coil in place.

The center support for the driven element is also junk drawer stuff, a 3/4" PVC tee. I made a bushing of 1/2" plastic, flexible water tubing and inside of that slipped a longer piece of the CPVC pipe. All that is glued together inside the tee and held by a self-tapping screw for extra measure. Another piece of the black water pipe fits very tightly over the butt end of a fishing pole (so tight that the hose clamp is really superfluous). Thus, the pole can be slip-fit onto the center tee and is held quite snugly. It won't stand a gale, but who's out pounding brass in that kind of weather!

I've attached a short length of coax with ferrite bead balun permanently to the tee along with a couple of Fahnstock clips to hold the element wires. The most expensive part of the whole thing are the poles, but they are not too bad. You can still get 3+ meter poles on eBay for about 8 bucks shipped anywhere. Since I'm not drilling any holes in them I can re-purpose them easily if this antenna doesn't get used much.

As you can see it makes a pretty tidy package that could fit a stuff bug easily. Of course, I haven't made a boom yet, and I'm still working on how to put together a 1/2 wl mast. I should be able to test the driven element in the next couple of days to see if it's even close to resonance and maybe by week-end give the whole thing a workout with the KX1.

In my research on this design I also ran across an enticing paper on how to build a reduced size Moxon by using helical loading of the elements. That sounds very interesting.

DX is a Beach

2011-07-09T05:26:00.002-06:00

I'll be summarizing our 4 day trip to the Caribbean side of Costa Rica in A Dull Roar with more pictures, but suffice it to say we had an interesting and relaxing time. I wish I could say that the radio operation was equally as successful as the rest of the trip, but it was hit-miss-miss.

The first evening I opted for the straightforward 33' wire up in a tree and 33' radial perpendicular to the water (North-South) having found the perfect branch and a ready-made "shack". I had to rely on the internal NiMH batteries for power, which gave me 1.3 watts out at most.

Even so, I was able to make two QSOs on 20 meters: Stan, KZed8G, Holly, Michigan 599/559, and Art, M/SP3CW, 579/449. Respectively, 2800 and 2400 km/watt, quite respectable if I say so myself! After about 45 minutes of this session the "Bat Low" indicator came on, which perhaps was just as well. As the saying goes, I should have quit while I was ahead. The next two evenings were shutouts.

The first evening I'd setup just at sunset so as to catch the grey-line, but I wasn't so lucky Tuesday and Wednesday to find that magic line due to our dinner plans. I thought I'd be able to compensate for that by getting more juice into the rig so I set up in the shared kitchen of the hotel where I could plug into AC. This gave me 3.5 to 4.0 watts and I used the same antenna setup as before. 20 meters was open around 3-4 PM local time but it seemed no one could hear me. On Wednesday I couldn't start until after dark, just in time to hear 20 close up. I tried 40 meters for about an hour but there were few signals and with the antenna I had I figured I was pretty much an NVIS radiator anyway.

Whether it was a case of bad timing or being further back from the salt water we'll never know. Such are the vagaries of QRP and HF radio. In any case, I couldn't have asked for a better operating position and it was nice to do some CW work again. As always, such challenges set my mind off racing for new antenna designs (and in search of a 12V gel cell!). I'd made a quickie linear loaded dipole to take along but it seemed too much hassle to string it up without my slingshot handy. This weekend I will work on a portable yagi for 20 meters either inductively or linearly loaded. I have some small fiberglass fishing poles that should make excellent element supports.

73, Casey, ex-TI6/NA7U

Going Portable, Going Caribbean

2011-07-02T19:05:00.001-06:00

Sidenote: I've made some additions to the blog rolls on both sides of this page, just in case you didn't notice.

I don't recall if I mentioned in this blog or the other one that Sean is on a 3-week mid-year school break right now. It kind of sneaked up on me, but I managed to arrange for us to take partial advantage of that by visiting the Caribbean side of the "island" next week. We'll be gone four days, two for travel, two to relax. The Puerto Viejo area, south of the port of Limón, is just over 100 Km from us as the toucan flies, but there are no direct roads over the intervening Talamanca mountain range. So, instead one must drive far north then east then south. It's about 7 hours of driving believe it or not! Costa Rica is small but travel is typically long from point A to B.

I guess I haven't operated a rig portable in so long that it didn't dawn on me until yesterday that I should bring along the KX1 and see if I can squeeze in a few QSOs. Hastily, I pulled together my emergency operating pack as you see on the right. I had a nice 8-cell AA battery pack but I neglected to remove the alkaline cells and one or two of them leaked ruining a couple of contacts.

One difference with the KX1 versus my previous K1 is that the upper input voltage limit, according to spec, is 14V. The K1 could take 16V if I remember right. In any case with the K1 I could have used my 15V laptop PS. I found a suitably spec'd wall wart supply (12VDC, 1A) and though the radio works on it, I did check the V display and it says 14.9V. Hmmmm. Oh, and I did monitore the signal on a K2 to be sure there was no aurally detectable AC ripple (wouldn't that have been ironic after my RST bashing, hi hi).

Those two spools of single strand speaker wire are my antenna, each leg about 30' long. I used to try and get high-floor hotel rooms when I was traveling in my corporate days and hang one wire out a window and use the other as counterpoise. Then I got to thinking that since I'll be right on the beach that perhaps I should slap together some kind of vertical and take advantage of that saltwater ground plane. I put together a couple of prototypes and it seems I can make a reasonable 1/4w bottom-loaded antenna by tomorrow. If I do, I'll post the results here when I get back.

I had just enough light left today to take the KX1 out on the patio and hook it up to the EDZ with some alligator clips and I managed to reach KI0E in North Dakota within a couple of CQ cycles on 20 meters with 4W. We'll see how I do over on El Caribe. No sked, of course, just will turn on the rig when the opportunities arise.

We hope to see and photograph a lot of wildlife over there (monkeys, sloths, jaguars, macaws, etc.), get in some snorkeling, good eats, and have a relaxing time. I have been to the Caribbean before in other countries but not in Costa Rica. For Tamara and Sean it's their first time. Hard to believe we haven't gone in the nearly 3 years we've been here already.

Now I have to go figure out which CR radio district number I have to use over there...

73!

Update: I'll be TI6/NA7U on this trip

The new KX3, gotta have it!

2011-06-30T12:25:00.001-06:00

I first read about the new Elecraft KX3 on VE3WDM's blog post about this new radio's Field Day live rehearsal. Unfortunately, price and ordering will be unavailable until "Fall-Winter" of this year (start your Christmas list now!) though preliminary specs are there at the Elecraft site. I'll say this for Elecraft, they know how to make me itch where I scratch! I predict this rig will be a home run for them.

Why? Besides Elecraft's well-known and well-deserved reputation for making quality products, especially their receivers, I think they've filled a gaping niche like no one else can and are doing a good job of moving forward with the tides of change, specifically being "SDR-based" (I'm anxious to hear what that really means in this case).

This is not your dad's QRP rig fellow hams. It comes with so many bells and whistles, full 160-6 meter coverage and general coverage receive, PBT (I've missed that since I let go my TR7), roofing filters in addition to DSP filtering, a CW-center indicator (bye-bye zero beat), built-in support for digi-modes (is a mini-keyboard far behind?) and so on. Does the 3800 Hz roofing filter mean that it's also ESSB ready? And, all in a very compact (albeit boring styled) package that sips power. Why they stuck to an RS232 port instead of USB, however, is beyond me (I hope I read that wrong). Bottom line, I'm much more excited by this new offering than I was about the K3.

The ability to plug into an external 100W amp is icing on the cake and must have been enabled by some recent FCC reg change as this was not commercially possible with the K2. The K-Twins setup with outboard ATU/PA, which I have, was a DIY project.

If Elecraft has really gotten the word about SDR and its implications going forward, and I have faith that the clever folks there do, then I hope they have already hired or soon will, designers of software architecture and software human interfaces if they know what's good for them and their customers. Because eventually the radio becomes another computer peripheral, how else could it be?

And while on the subject of design, they could borrow some of Apple's design pizzazz, as one example, and get away from the basic black box. I know we hams are pretty much a non-aesthetic lot, but this is the 21st century after all! Here's my contribution to what could be done thanks to Photodraw. What do you think Elecraft? Too late to change the case? :^D