Today saw me testing a theory, that 40 meters wasn’t closed just because it was late in the morning…
When I got to US-2169 today, I wanted to get on the air quickly, so I decided that I would activate the Sitton Gulch parking lot instead of going to the top of the mountain. This one thing adds about 40 minutes to my operating time as it takes me about 20 more minutes to drive to the top of the mountain from here and then there is the drive back down. Armed with this extra time, I decided to also add a long radial so 40 meters would tune up to a usable SWR. I was able to get the SWR on 40 meters CW down to about 1.6:1 and this is what I made all my 40 meter contacts at. The beauty of Ten Tec radios is their notoriously robust transmitters and the legend that they can survive transmitting into 10:1 SWR without ill effects. I have personally used my Argonaut 5 in 2.5:1 conditions and had no problems at all.
Today I thought I would just jump on 40 meters for a minute and see what I could scare up on CW then move over to FT8 before heading up to 20 meters. I was not ready for the pile up that happened next… It was interesting as there really wasn’t much activity on 40 meters at the time when I hopped on. It was almost lunch time at this point (late morning) and the noise on the band was picking up. I sent out my CQ a few times and it didn’t take long to get an answer. I also spotted myself on the app too and I am certain this helped immensely as well.
I worked over 10 contacts in about as many minutes and was stocked to have bagged the activation so easily. I switched over to FT8 now that I have cleared my little pileup on CW and see what I can find there!
I simply added a couple more radials to the antenna to help with SWR so that I could operate on 40 meters today. One of these radials was over 30 feet long! The 40 meter ham stick that I have is not that great of an antenna from what I have seen. The SWR is really touchy with it and I can not get it to tune without several large radials helping it. I dont know what I am doing wrong with it, but I really need to figure it out as the 40 meter band is a lot of fun!
The measurment kit below has becoume part of my permenant truck POTA kit that I take with me everywhere. It has the nanoVNA and all the associated widgets for it as well as a simple little multi-meter to check things with out in the field. This has been very valuable at times and a I recommend everyone carry a simple meter with them.
Here is a simple little hack that I found with my Ten Tec Argonaut 5 radio that I though was cool. You can make up a front (mic plug) connector for the keyer cable instead of using the tiny one on the back if you will simply wire the keyer contact from the keyer or key across the PTT contact on the mic plug. It works flawlessly and is simpler to setup for me. I have the cable for the back too should this one fail for some reason, but this is more elegant for me. Notice all the RF blocking devices I have added to the lines to reduce (read that as eliminate) erroneous characters from being sent due to stray RF.
After my little interlude on 40 meter CW, I switched radios to the sBitx to be able to work some FT8 on 40 meters as well… This was not a great idea as the SWR was 3.5:1 in the part of the band and I didn’t want to risk damage to the finals so I made one contact and then moved to 20 meters for the duration of the activation. Once on 20 meters, this is where things REALLY took off for me today. I started hunting and pouncing on contacts on FT8 before I finally just setup on an empty slot and started calling CQ myself. This produced a lot of contacts. A really good run ensued and I was glad to see that I was able to put many calls in the log on this day with the sBitx. Shoot, I even worked a couple of SSB contacts as well, but it was a struggle to be honest with only about 9 watts or so in the SSB portion since my antenna is tuned for the CW portion of the band.
Here is a rare glimpse into my “go” kit for my Ten Tec Argonaut 5 as a CW kit. I need to add the microphone to it so I can use it for SSB as well but I am not sure if the SSB mod has been done to this one yet. Haha. It works so well for CW that I have not bothered to check! But the kit contains the radio, tuner, wire antenna, key and keyer plus all the cabling to get everything connected. It is only missing a power source but that is by design. I carry batteries for remote ops or plug into the truck for mobile operations which is why I dont have a battery in the kit.
Here we have yours truly operating the sBitx on FT8 and to be honest, it works almost too well for this. To the point that I am almost not even interested in the other modes with it… Almost… I love working from the bed cover if it is nice outside as it is the perfect height for my uses.
This was a great day for radio and the logbook reflects it, looks like the solar cycle is picking up for the winter run! This is the time to get on ten meters and work some DX yall! I should know as the next blog post will reveal next week!
73
David
