I decided to pack up the Argonaut 5 and go activate Cloudland Canyon today to get some much needed air time and wanted to try out my new POTA key that I picked up at the 2023 Hamfest in Huntsville a little while back (actually you will be reading this in the future as I picked up the key last weekend but so is the life of a blog post) So follow along and look at what I found out today while making a few contacts from K-2169.
I also decided to do some testing of the Reliance Antenna Bugout 40 EFHW I had bought from N3VAN who was making them and selling them on the QRZ forums. The antenna looks really good with lots of attention to detail in the construction. I have never used an antenna that doesn’t have radials or a formal counterpoise at all. This one uses the coax shield as the counterpoise so, in theory, you don’t need a counterpoise at all. (Come to find out, you can bend the rules of EFHW antennas if you do add a counterpoise) I strung it up in the air between two trees out near the bluff at the park. This may have doped my results, but I am doing a test anyway so why not, right? The far end is about 30’ in the air. The near end is about 12’ up to the transformer and I dropped a 15’ piece of coax down to the radio. Done. Well, so I thought at least.
The far end is way up in this bright green tree behind my hand in the back ground. I am pointing to the end of the wire location in the tree.
Once I got the antenna up in the trees, I wanted to see what the plot looked like on the nanoVNA so I plugged it all in and this is what I got. The antenna is technically slightly long and is a little below optimal frequency on this day and rigged like this. I am not going to trim it at this point as I want to see what it does in other kinds of conditions like the winter and maybe right after a rain when it is still wet or maybe where it is set up over night and is soaked with dew. Even though it was off frequency a little in the configuration I had it in, the SWR was well within safe limits for operating any transceiver. I didn’t have a 2:1 SWR at any point when I was testing a particular band and that if fine with me if I don’t have to carry a tuner with me. There was a side bonus to this setup too, for some reason with the whole antenna elevated like I had it, it was giving me a wide coverage (read that as a low q) in the bottom of the 10 meter band. So low in fact, that it was within usable range even on 12 meters without needing any sort of a tuner! That is 40,20,15,12 & 10 in one antenna with zero mods needed. That is winning in my book.
This was the plot without anything other than the 15’ coax going to the common mode choke.
Now get this, I added a radial to the system, but in an unusual location. I put it on the end of the coax on the connector next to the common mode choke right next to the radio and just stretched it out over the ground. This length of wire was 9.5’ in length and when I did this, the plot changed a lot. I lost the 12 meter dip but picked up a much broader area between 20 and 15 meters to the point that 17 meters was below 2:1 SWR at this point. This means that if I add this simple piece of wire I now have a “no tuner needed” antenna that covers 6 bands! Almost everything is usable…sans 30 meters, so I am really happy with this antenna. The next time I set it up will be to test it as a sloper like it would be used if it is a portable setup and I had only one tree to rig it to. Then we will plot it again and see what I come up with. I am curious to see if the frequency of the dips changes with the relation of the end of the antenna to the ground. I dont think it will but RF is a fickle girl…lol.
This plot is the aforementioned setup plus a 9.5’ length of wire tied to the coax connecter at the common mode choke.
This much wire is all that I needed to gain access to 17 meters without having to carry an antenna tuner with me, this is very liberating to be honest. Just adding a small radial to the system makes this super easy to use. The Reliance Antennas 40m Bugout EFHW comes with a winder to store in on as well as a carabiner clip to connect the far end to the cord. The transformer end has an eye bolt that works well for a hoist point to raise the other end of the antenna.
I next setup the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 radio on the table and connected all the stuff to make it work. Once it was powered up and ready, I plugged in the star of the show, my new N3ZN CW Key. He builds some really nice keys and I have walked by his table at several hamfests recently and today I decided that it was time to give one a whirl as they say. So I chose the smallest one he had at the show since I wanted it for POTA activations. The plan is to keep it in the Argonaut “GO BOX” that I built last year. It took me two trips to the field to learn to use it properly too. Since it is so small, if you have a heavy hand when you send it will move around a lot on you. The trick is to set the action light enough that you just have to touch the paddles to send the code, this way it is a light operation and the key stays put on the table like it should. These keys come with the cord hardwired to them so you cant buy a simple aux cable and plug it into the key, but it didn’t cause me any trouble so I don’t mind it. The installed cable is high quality and I have no doubt that it will last a very long time.
Once the antenna was squared away and I had my 17m “element” nearby, I was ready to crank up the radio. The new key plugged into the keyer I recently acquired from eBay and we are off to the races! Or so I thought as it turned out that KJ4BAD happened to be walking by and stopped in to see if I was doing POTA and we had a great chat for about 10 minutes or so about all things radio. I always enjoy running into other hams while out at a park.
I really like the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 radio, it has almost all of the CW functions that I use are on the surface. There is a could of things that you hit a button and then make the adjustments and you are good to go. The other thing that is great about this radio is that it has 20 watts of transmitter power. This is awesome when the bands are not as good as they were back in the winter. Also the DSP filtering works surprisingly well. It is also really good with other modes, but I just use it for CW… I might make a cable at some point to put the key into the front socket instead so it is simpler to connect the key. You see the mic key will key the radio so that means my little memory keyer will work in that socket. Who knows when I will do that though…
After we finished chatting I settled in for some POTA therapy and dialed around a little to find 15 was open with a bunch of stations on the air. I setup and start calling and you can see in the log that I only made two contacts before giving up and moving to 17 meters where I usually make several contacts but today I only netted one. Things were looking pretty dismal till I went to 20 meters. Once on 20 things turned around for me. I fairly quickly got the activation and proved out all the gear I had brought that day.
This photo shows where I would place the extra radial on the Coax connector. The coupling between the common mode choke and the feedline made for an easy spot to add it. I simply stripped the wire back a little and twisted the wire over this point. Simple as that. The easiest mod I have ever done to tune my antenna to another band in the history of ever.
This was the view I had today while operating, this is why I like POTA over other activities. The view is epic. So there you have it. My POTA “test and tune” trip in a simple blog post. Until next time, 72.
de WK4DS