Today saw me field a “new-to-me” radio, a Ten Tec Scout 555.
If you have never seen one of these radios, you are not alone. This is a radio that was produced for only about 15 years, towards the end of the company’s life before it changed hands around 10 years ago. It is unique in that it doesn’t contain every band but rather only one at a time. These little modules each contain the special bits to make it work on each band they are designed for and the goal back in the day way to just get the bands that you use. Turned out that these radios quickly formed a cult following and they all wanted the “whole set” of bands for them. I have the whole set of bands thanks to KG4WBI rounding up an 80 meter module and presenting it to me as an early birthday present. Once I had the whole set, I felt this iconic antique needed a better way to travel around when in my truck so I went to Harbor Freight and grabbed an Apache 4800 hard shell case for it. The Ten Tec Scout fits perfectly alongside the set of band modules. I even created a pocket under the radio to store the power cord so I have the whole rig in the case. (The 20 meter module is currently installed in the radio in the below photo)
Today saw me back in the “truck-shack” (I think this is what I am going to start calling this in the future) and setting the radio up on the hard shell case in the passenger seat. Today’s setup was not for power access though as my internal power cord it only fused to 10 amps and the Scout draws that much on transmit normally since it is not user adjustable on the front panel…yet.
I have found a website about the Scout that is a literal treasure trove of information about this radio, mainly in the CW mode, but a wealth of information none the less. I found the website by watching Coastal Waves and Wires video here. The website is by NA5N and is linked here for quick access… His mods for the Scout are pretty extensive an he does a great job of documenting the mods as well as explaining the process the radio uses to transmit and receive and he even has these hand drawn graphics that are amazing.
Back to the activation after chasing a rabbit for a minute…
So today I started on 40 meters as I figured I could make a good many contacts there on SSB, problem is that I have tuned my ham sticks for the CW portion of the band and the 40 meter ham stick is not very broad banded so it really wasn’t going to allow this. What did I do then? Well, I got on CW and made a few contacts before moving up to 20 meters where the antenna is broad banded enough to cover the entire amateur band space.
A couple of noteworthy items here. The 36Ah battery weighs almost nothing but packs a ton of energy. I use it from time to time to power my POTA ops but most of the time it is backup power in my shack for use during power outages and emergency nets and such.
The key I am using today is the Gemini and is a great little collapsible travel key. I had one little problem with it right after buying it due to the center post working loose but other than that it has been flawless. Great portable CW key if your wondering.
The antenna setup is as follows, hamstick riser, hamstick in QD socket, then several radials to form a counterpoise. I have taken to running one or two LONG radial now to play with how they interact with the hamstick antennas and so far it has been interesting to say the least.I found that on 40 meters, if the long radials were pulled taught, (I “anchor” them with a simple weight so I dont need tent stakes) that the resonant point would be well under 7.000mhz, but if I pulled just enough slack in them that they laid on the ground all the way except the first 8 feet from the antenna. Imagine gently curving down to the ground about 7’ from the yellow antenna riser then laying on the grass the rest of the way out. This moved the resonant center value up into the CW portion of the 40 meter band.
The point here is that the length and position of your radial field is absoloutly critical to your antenna system as a whole. The more I play with these radials, the more I learn about how they interact with the system and how important it is to measure your antenna prior to starting your activation if you build it on site.
In the photo below you can see how the radials were setup for the 20 meter band.
Remember at the beginning of this story where I mentioned “ominous” clouds? Well, here is a photo of them to show you what I meant. That looks like rain to me, I did get by without getting rained on before finishing, but that looks EXACTLY like the kind of clouds that bring rain to my area of operation.
Some thoughts on the logbook from today. I have gotten very comfortable with paper logging in the field and then transcribing at home. I did it today actually and it was fine…for the most part. But there was a couple of times when I needed a helper to log for me when I was working SSB. SSB happens so much faster than CW does for me that I was struggling to keep up with the log.
If you will notice in my other posts, I will number the QSOs and even write out the time on the FT8 QSOs as they are pretty slow to complete for me. But once I moved to 20 meters today and jumped on the air with more than 17 watts, things got sporty! I literally stopped writing line numbers, abbreviated most of the time stamps and even left out some of the states just to keep up! It was madness! I could not believe how much more your signal gets out with that minimal amount of power increase. It was a blessing and a curse at the same time, I now see why people will computer log in the field and have a helper to log for them so they can keep up. I could have easily worked 100 QSOs without trying hard if I had just stayed longer at the park. The SSB portion was on fire! The CW portion was doing fine too, but there were SO many more ops on SSB on this day…so many more… In the end, I had a great time and even worked my buddy Roger KG4WBI, this has to be my closest 20 meter contact for POTA ever. If I measured it right we were 2.9 miles apart. LOL What a great day to be on the air!
73
WK4DS