Today once again saw the Ten Tec Argonaut come out of hiding to make some CW contacts. I really love using this radio for some reason and it has become a permanent part of my POTA kit at this point. If I travel and take radios, this is one of them that I take now. I just love the whole thing..,
This is what my POTA wagon looks like most of the time now. Antennas are in the tube, COAX rolled and at the ready next to it. Camping chairs stay in the truck now, I dont even unload them anymore. Lol. Then a laundry list of other stuff stored in totes to keep it somewhat organized. This is why I like the hardshell bed covers, it turns my truck into an overgrown car with a giant trunk.
When I got there it had just started sprinkling rain so I decided to setup in the truck and just use CW for a change. This means using one of my all time favorite CW rigs for POTA… the Ten Tec Argonaut 5. So I hastily deploy an antenna and a single little radial and hop in the truck to avoid the rain.
Funny thing is, the rain never happened…
I went ahead with the activation anyway as planned. This also meant I got the N3ZN key out as well as the Hamgadgets Picokeyer. This combination is a great little setup but today my mojo was off for a while or something. I couldn’t seem to get my act together and send decent code for some reason… about 15 minutes in, I guess I got warmed up and was able to do much better but those first few contacts were rough.
As you can see from the report above, the space weather was kinda strange that day with the high probability of a flare coupled with the K index being elevated as well, but the noise floor was really low so what does a guy do?
I got on the air with CW is what I did. The band was fading pretty good but it was workable so I started working some contacts. You can see below that one of my RBN reports shows that I had pretty strong signals at times. The QSB was deep at times though and this made getting contacts a little challenging at times. It is always fun, but some outings are more fun than others…lol.
The station is convenient in the cab of the truck but it is also noisy. You have to balance the ambient noise level with your mode and comfort level. Here you can see a car has just went by. This can be so loud that I can’t roll down my window for the car noise of some cars. Another option for CW here is to wear headphones and this has worked in the past, but today I didn’t bother with them.
That is another beautiful thing about FT8. I can turn the volume all the way to zero and still make contacts just fine. This is nice when it gets really hot as I can idle the truck and run the AC…lol or be in a noisy environment like here and still make contacts with ease. Just something to think about when choosing your location.
In this photo, I am holding the cable up to show I have wired it to the PTT input on the front of the radio. I made this cable up for 3 reasons:
1. The cable is easier to connect as the port on the back is right next to the heat sink and is hard to work with at times.
2. This location reduces the chance of stray RF causing the keyer to send erroneous dits and dahs since the coax is on the other side of the radio.
3. The cable is shorter and thereby easier to deploy and stow when done.
This was an experiment to see if the Picokeyer could also operate the PTT line on the front of the radio as you can use the hand mic like a straight key on these Ten Tec radios.
As you can see from the log, I had a regular ole QSO ragchew style contact right off the bat. This is from the fact he must have been simply on frequency when I called QRL to see if anyone was there. He answered and we had a nice little chat before I even got started with my usual POTA stuff. I was a little surprised by the band opening to the west coast as I got Washington state, Utah and New Mexico all in the log on this day. Usually 20 meters and a hamstick don’t play well with the west coast. Especially from a super compromised location like I am using here. Maybe it had more to do with my ground plane was deployed south and west today. You see, at the other local park I am normally deploying the radials to the North, East and South but the orientation of the parking lot is such that I can’t easily deploy a radial to the west. This doesn’t seem to matter for 17 and 15 meters though as I routinely get stations from out west on these bands…who knows?…