It took me a few weeks since I had a ton of things happening. Now that things have settled down a little, I am able to get out and do some radio and then also to write about it too. That has also compounded the problem it seems… anyway, here we are at US-2169 again and this time I am setup at the canyon rim parking lot as Teresa went with me and she wanted to go to the canyon rim to read while I made contacts with ya’ll. I chose this corner as it was in the shade and it was evening too, so this meant that the sun would not cross my truck for the whole of the activation. This is nice as I am usually out in the sun when I am up on top of the hill and today was quite warm if in the direct sun.
I had spoken with a new friend and we agreed that if he could hear me that we would work each other from the park so he could get hunter credit as well as me getting activator credit. We had already “tested the waters” so to speak as we had already gotten on 15 meters SSB in the shack at my house and talked for a while earlier in the day. This is what let me know that the band was open too. The recent solar storms had me pretty well convinced that the higher bands would be a ghost town, boy was I wrong about that!
I decided to just run the 15 meter band all day so that I could see if I could get the activation on 15 meters even with the terrible band conditions. Turns out I could! I worked three different modes today on two different radios, just so I could use them. The first thing though was to get the SWR as low as I could and I would up with this plot on the nanoVNA. This is perfectly usable and I, in fact did use it like this to great effect! It was only about 1.1:1 down in the CW portion with is a wonderful reading for the radio. I made my adjustments by adding and moving the radials around till the plot looked like I wanted it to on the VNA. This has worked really well for me thus far.
The first radio that I used today was the Ten Tec Scout 555 with the 15 meter module in it. My particular radio has not had the output power mod done to it so it still puts out the rated power and is not readily adjustable. Mine makes about 40 watts on the truck batteries (they are kind of old at this point so they are not quite 13.8 volts anymore) and a solid 50 watts if the alternator is running. This is perfect for SSB POTA operations in my book so I got on the air and started calling CQ. It didn’t take long till K7LZZ answered me from one of the New England states. He was operating mobile with a FT-897 if I remember right running about 100 watts and we both agreed that the path was strong and reliable even with my 40 watts. After we chatted a for a minute, we exchanged 73s and I proceeded to call CQ for several minutes without another single op answering me at all…it was like the band simply closed down or something. I finally gave up and moved down to the CW portion…
I also used this radio for the CW portion of the activation as it is really easy to switch over to CW on this machine. This radio has no mode switch. SSB and CW use the exact same mode and you simple inject a side tone for CW when you close the key contact. You just have to remember that the side tone is running in the sideband so the VFO will read low if you are using upper side band and high if you are on the lower bands by about 700 hertz. I had the radio set to 21.0534 and it was coming up on the RBN as 21.054. On SSB it seems to not matter for some reason, but on CW it does. Also of note, the radio has a built in paddle keyer (I think it is simply a Curtis keyer chip wired into the radio), but I prefer to run my HamGadgets Pico keyer as it has memories and for this you simply plug into the straight key input.
You can see below where the RBN showed me at 21.0541 while the VFO said 21.0534 (I think…it did fluctuate a little as the radio warmed up to be honest) Propagation was fading and the CW reports kinda show it, but the RBN numbers really showed it. Too bad I didnt get a photo of that for you, so you will just have to take my word for it…haha.
I made quite a few contacts in short order with CW once the spotter page showed my activation. It was good to get some familiar calls like KJ7DT and K1PUG along with some DX stations as well!!! It is always awesome to get those in the log. At one point I had a station down in the noise that I am pretty sure was a J call but everytime I tried to copy the band would just fade away… That made me sad… Getting a J call in the log is always awesome and especially during an activation!!!
What struck me as odd was that I got zero replies on SSB save for the one with K7LZZ who was looking for me to activate. Here is the kicker though, he was mobile and I was on a ham stick and we were both 59 signals into New England!!!
The second radio for this outing was the sBitx V3 with the new V4 software installed. I have every version of the software saved in the hardcase on micro SD cards ready to install in the radio should I want to downgrade or if the one in the radio just dies or something like that. They might not have all the fluff the new version has, but they were a working version so I hang on to them anyway.
The V4 version has an astonishing amount of updates and changes and I am still learning about all the new features that came with the V4 release. I will write about it soon and share some of them with you. For now, we are focusing on the FT8 stuff that I noticed right away. The new color scheme for things makes it a lot easier to use. All the calling stations are now in red, the CQ are white and the grids are color coded so that you can see which ones you need and which ones you have already collected. The orange line is your line where your sending and this helps to know where the cutoff is for the last cycle so you dont waste time scouring calls that are not there now… That alone was a huge help. The completed and logged note is still a solid white line like you see in the image below.
For me the output power levels didn’t change, I think it is because I did the update to my existing V3.027 release instead of simply burning a new image that doesn’t contain my radio‘s personality. I didn’t lose my logbook or anything so it was great. You can see I get about 10 watts output on 15 meters. This is plenty when the band is open, especially for digital modes.
As you can see in the log, there are more CW ops hunting on 15 meters (that could hear my 40 watts…to be fair) than there was on voice. I was using 40 watts on SSB though so I should have been able to make a few more than just the one. Either way, it worked out and all the DX in the log just made it sweeter. So this should be a testament to everyone that if one mode isn’t producing results then maybe hop on a different more and you will have better luck.
Until next time, I hope to hear you on the air!
73
WK4DS
