I started today’s activation at the Sitton’s Gulch parking area. This is a quick access location for me as it is only about 15 minutes from my house to this spot.
First thing I had to do before the activation though was make a new center conductor for my hamstick mount. Since I made the truck mount out of thicker flat bar stainless steel in the machine shop, it didn’t occur to me that the antenna adapter is going to be too short. Well, it was and I ended up stripping out the last 2 threads on the stud because that was all that was holding it together. Problem here was that I couldn’t reuse it like it was, enter the machine shop at this point.
Below shows the arbor press pushing out the center conductor from the mount itself. This turned out to be a fairly straight forward affair as well, which was nice.
Once out of the arbor press, I was able to examine it more closely. It is a simple part so I decided to make a new one out of bar stock. I dug around in a couple of bins and came up with some brass bar stock and set it up in the lathe and proceeded to cut out a new center stud that was the right size for my needs…
Here we have the new part coming out of the bar and all the unneeded parts (chips) flying off at high speed! Lol. I love machining brass, it is such a joy to work with compared to stainless steel or titanium… Since the stud is press fitted into the body I really had to watch a couple of the dimensions to make sure they would fit properly, but several were pretty loose and were really not critical so I was able to get this part cut out in about an hour total, which for me isn’t too bad.
The solution was to make a new stud that is .200” longer thus allowing for the thickness of my mount. I simply replicated the same measurements, other than the length of the threads, and pressed it back into the housing and now I have an antenna mount with the correct amount of threads for my particular application. I also did one other thing too, I hand fitted the threads to the coupler that screws onto it, this gives me the best possible thread fit between these two part as well as the strongest fit as well. Since I know this is the only place these two devices will ever be together I don’t think it will turn out to be a problem later should there be some need to use it with another setup.
With it repaired and installed on the riser frame, I can now get back on the air and stay warm in the truck too!
Something of note in the below photo is that I use the nanoVNA to check my antenna every time I setup now (or as often as possible as long as I have it with me and it is charged up). I have found some odd stuff a couple of times too because of it. This is how I found the broken coax center conductor a while back as well as some band Sta-kon connectors on my radials a couple of times.
I will even use it between band changes just to see what the SWR is going to be like in a certain band location now. It is a really handy little tool. I highly recommend you picking one of these up and learning a little about it at some point, they are fairly inexpensive compared to the antenna analyzers and will give you the same information plus some. It just takes a little time with YouTube and some patience…
Once the antenna was deployed, I got back in the truck and powered up the radio to see if there was anything going on and boy was there! In this photo I am working FT8 on 15meters and as you can see the band was not very active with FT8 operators (you can see it on the waterfall). No one answered me, probably because they couldn’t hear me very well compared to other ops, and after a while I decided to see if there was any CW contacts on 15. After several minutes of calling CQ, I had netted just two contacts. These two showed how good 15 meters is for distance though with both of them being a great distance away from my park. So sometimes the band just isnt there for you to make contacts even if the RBN says it is.
All that aside, I started on 20 meters as it is my goto band if I dont have a lot of time. If you have been reading my blog posts for a while, you will know this, so here I am on 20 meters and I decide to start on CW this time and see what I can find. I get my spot on the POTA site and off we go, it didnt take long to secure the activation and then some and once I had cleared the little pile up I had going I decided to hop on FT8 to see what I could do. FT8 went really well there to with me netting 14 QSOs there as well before I decided to move up to 15 meters. What I really like about FT8 is that it is pretty hands off, this allowed me to fill out me log on HAMRS and get it caught up to the most recent QSO before I finished out this mode and changed bands. That is really cool in my book.
Now that I have the wiring in the doors repaired I am able to route the antenna coax though the window the easy way as long as it isn’t raining… This is really fast and doesn’t pinch the coax like running it through the door jamb does when I operate in the rain. You really don’t know how convenient this is till you don’t have access to a feature like windows that roll down… It is almost comical how long I put off repairing the wiring in the two back doors and to be honest, it really wasnt that hard either…live and learn.
In the above screenshot you can see that there was plenty of signal but there just wasn’t many CW ops on the band. I did get one Canadian and Paul up in Idaho before going QRT though. I was happy to get at least a couple of contacts once I setup on the band. It is always interesting to see what the range of a band is when the higher bands are open. I have gotten some pretty long distance stuff with some really bad antennas on 10, 12 and 15 meters in the past. It just takes going up to those bands and looking around and the right time of day for it to work…the band has to be open too, but we all know that at this point…lol.
Today’s key was the Gemini Ham Radio travel key, This little key is great for me as it is the perfect size for my hand and I really like how it collapses into the housing for travel. When you take it apart, you see how simple the design is and that you don’t have to have this super complex device to send good code. This thing really is pretty simple and it works great.
Below shows the radial field I laid out today and this was just to give it something to work with as they are all on the same side of the truck! I used one of my tuned 20 meter radials and the set of 17 meter radials and this gave me great SWR on 15 and 20 meters. I like it when this works out… Of course, since I am using a ham stick, the truck body is part of the ground plane and the radials interact with it so the SWR will depend on where I put the radials. This is why I always attempt to put them at right angles to the mount if at all possible as this is how I tuned them initially and also allows me to adjust SWR somewhat by simply moving them around behind the truck.
This is also a first for me as my log shows almost as many FT8 contacts as CW contacts. (14) FT8 contacts and (19) CW contacts is a good day when you only have an hour and a half or so to operate. I have never been one to try to get hundreds of contacts in one outing, even though it has happened a couple of times, I am more about just getting on the air and having some fun. So at some point I hope to work you on one of my POTA trips!
73
WK4DS