Back in Florida and at a park!!!

Since I am down in Florida for a little while and I am finally going to Hamcation, I thought I would do some POTA as well. Today I had a few hours to spare so I went out to K-1829

This is a new “to me” park so I was a little excited to see what it would be like. When I first looked it up, I noticed it has a check in station at the entrance of the park and a campground and lots of trails. This park is quite large too so it was going to be interesting to see where I could find a spot to setup. With gated entrances and check in stations, these parks usually charge a fee to enter them. Not so here, well sort of… You see, as I was getting near the entrance, I noticed this equestrian parking area and when I checked the map, it was fully within the park boundries. I checked the board for parking rules and there were no rules like payment needed or any specific place or anything like that, so I pulled in here as it was right off the main road.

Once I found a spot under a shade tree, I started thinking about what band to start on. I settled on the highest band I have a hamstick for…15 meters.

This is where I learned something today about the setup that I didn’t know before. The coax is what makes this antenna resonant on 15 meters. Yep ,I put the common mode choke at the base of the antenna and the SWR was 1.4 to 1. Move the choke to the other end of the coax and it was 1.021 to 1! I guess I tuned it with this piece of coax in this position or something as I had deployed the 20 meter radials and then the 30 meter radials to help and wiht just the 20 meter radials, the SWR was 1.65 to 1. This is technically usable, but I prefer it to be a better match to the transmitter output impedance, so I kept experimenting till I figured it out.

Below shows the first radio I used today. The TenTec Argonaut 5 is a wonderful little radio. Since I like CW for my activations, this is a great radio for me. I don’t even have a hand mic in the kit (I should change that to be honest)… Today saw me also as the MFJ 941C antenna tuner as well. I don’t need this tuner with my hamsticks as they are resonant antennas, but I wanted to play around with the SWR meter a little and this also allows me to keep an eye on the antenna system too as I can see the SWR changing in real time this was way. The Argonaut 5 has no built in SWR meter so this fixes that shortcoming for me.

Today also saw the re-emergence of my N3ZN CW key as will. It is a wonderful little key and works like a dream. I run this key through a Ham Gadgets memory keyer for my POTA ops. I store all four memory locations with useful data to streamline my activations. I also have two different cables to connect it to the radio with as well. One goes into the back where the traditional key input goes and the other is a hybrid cable that connects to the mic jack on the front of the radio. You can see it in the above photo with the noise suppression toroid inline. I have been so stuck on the sbitx radio lately that I had forgotten how fun it was to use this little radio.

After I worked a bunch of CW contacts, I moved up to the Ft8 part of the band and changed radios so I could work some FT8 contacts while I wrote out my log in HAMRS. Since FT8 is relatively hands off, I can get my log file for the POTA site done while getting some contacts on FT8 as well. I was able to get 19 digital contacts in the log today like this before I ran out of time. Not too bad for a guy who doesn’t know much about digital modes.

Here is a hint about the sbitx. Don’t forget to update the grid in your settings file before you start or you will be handing out the wrong grid… That one is free. Lol.

The one thing about Florida parks that is very different from back home is the presence of aligators in the water. Back home, it is nothing to goto the river with your friends in the summer and go swimming, but here that is a risky proposition. The park warns of it and I am pretty sure that is what I saw out in the water before I left for the day as well. It is hard to tell in this photo but there is a tiny object right in the middle of frame below that was moving in odd patterns around in the middle of the water, could have been a log, but my mind wants to say it was a gator…lol.

Here is another subject I learned about today you might say. I wanted to see how much difference it would make to move the common mode choke from one end of the coax to the other on my 15 meter hamstick as I am pretty sure I tuned it with the choke at the transceiver end of the line. Well, it made a huge difference to be honest about it.

The ground plane makes a huge difference if you plan to run resonant antennas, just keep that in mind while you are tuning up your system. EVERY device in the line will factor into the system impedance and is important. Dont forget that.

The log today shows of many Canadians as well as a Belgian too! I was really stoked to get them into the log as well as Utah and Idaho, those are all pretty long trips for 15 watts and a hamstick, but they made the trip! I am constantly amazed at what you can do with these little diminutive antennas to be honest about it. Just goes to show that about anything that will tune up (with or without a tuner) will radiate a signal and can make contacts. You hear about people having to load their gutters because of covenants restricting antennas and I dont doubt that they make a ton of contacts with them.

All in all, I see that there was no need to get the other antennas out at all. There was plenty going on up on the 15 meter band so I never bothered to move off the band. It was a great time and I hope to replicate it again soon.

Until then 73,

WK4DS

Winter Field Day 2024

It’s that time again. Winter Field Day is just as big of an event for the Dade County Amateur Radio Group as regular Field Day is in June.

We have used the New Home Community Center for a long time now and I want to thank Kevin for his efforts to keep it open for us. Here he is telling everyone something interesting while I take a selfie.

This year it was really warm on the Saturday of the event due to some sort of weather system that had moved in so it was really foggy at times (see the photo of my antenna on the truck below) and rainy at times, but I would rather have this over the cold. Well, that was Saturday, Sunday showed up with the AC on high as it was 43 in the AM and wet from the rain and the temp dropped continuously over the day as well. Not cool…errrr, I mean ….not fun!

Another thing about these events is that there is always something good to eat nearby!

Below we have several people setting up antennas and just being around for photos and such that were having a great time! I missed a couple of people somehow, so I hope they dont mind not being included in the blog…like W4EMA, I really dont know how I missed getting his photo, I kept having to walk past him… figures.

Roger KG4WBI (above) stopped by to visit even though he was still getting over the crud. He is always a wealth of knowledge about all sorts of things.

Below is Todd KK4YLF with his beautiful station he setup. This machine had a touch screen and all sorts of other tricks up it’s sleeve to allow it to work really well. It was impressive to see it setup for a field day site to say the least.

Alright Hollis, what is going on here? Lol. You look WAY to comfortable. LOL…

Below Josh is working some HF SSB on his FT891 into an EFHW and it worked well. How well? I’ll get to that in a little bit. There were stations setup everywhere this time.

Above is a photo of the display on the sBitx where we was using FT8 (yes, I now know this is not an allowed mode for winter field day…now, I guess I should read the rules more carefully first) and making contact with ZD7Z. This was a particular exciting QSO for us as we had randomly just hopped on 15 meters since no one else was up that high on their radios and he was the only station on the air up there. So we figured why not try to get a QSO? He actually heard us! We were blown away at this as we had a small radio on a wire antenna (Josh’s EFHW that I mentioned earlier) with expedient rigging and it still worked. We played around for a while and made several contacts on FT8 after that and could hear many more in other areas…and on a different band. Seems there was some sort of contest happening somewhere else at the same time and I mixed that up at times. Live and learn.

When I arrived, I just threw the radio together on the bed cover as the rain had stopped and wanted to play with it some so I made something like 20 FT8 contacts on it before I shut it down for the afternoon with many being in Europe as well as North America. It was a great day and this blog post didnt have quite as much dialog in it as usual, but there were a lot more photos this time so there is that. I hope you have a great day and till next time, 73.

Addendum: I have one more photo to share. Kevin got a photo of me as well as Ricky and Josh so W4EMA is now in the blog! Thanks Kevin, for the photo!

A quickie activation at Cloudland Canyon

Today I only had a short time and I wanted to get on the air so I loaded up the sBitx v2 and headed on over after work.

So I get to the Sitton’s Gulch parking area at the bottom of the mountain so I can save another 15 minutes of diriving time. I am in luck too as the parking lot was really empty to a and it allowed me to choose my favorite spot.

To get things on the air faster, I also used my hamstick for 20 meters and just ran out one counterpoise radial. Another thing that I realized today is that I need to work on my antenna parts as the radial was broken and the sta-kon also broke off where I connect it to the antenna mount… there is always something to do it seems. Luckily I made the mount to where I could also insert just the end of the wire and it would still work. This arrangment provided me with a 1.2:1 SWR as shown on the sBitx radio when I would transmit.

I also found that the wire was also broken in the middle as well. So I simply twisted it back together and just used it. It seemed to work just fine, well…it got the job done... I know there was something probably amiss with the current flow, but it got me on the air. We all know it works better when you have a continuous piece of wire, but if you don’t have one, you use what you have. In hindsight I should have just gotten the other radial out for it as I have two just alike, but you forget simple things like that when you are stressed out with a short timetable to work with.

Another noteworthy thing that happened today was that I rolled down the back window for the first time is about 3 or 4 years. You see this window stopped working several years ago and I knew what was wrong. The wiring passage from the truck to the door where the wire bends will eventually break these wires, it is an absolute that it will happen. Shortly later the other back door also failed in the same exact way (It is still broken as of this writing). Well, I finally got off my lazy rear end and ripped the truck apart last weekend and actually rebuilt the wiring harness through the flex conduit as you can see in the photos below. I plan to do the other door soon and I will actually video that process and plan to put it on my YouTube channel. It allows me to roll the window up and down AND the power door locks works in this door again!!! WOOHOO!!! You just don’t understand how convenient having this feature is until you don’t have it. Every single conductor was broken too, literally not a single wire was intact…lol.

Testing the connections before routing the wires back through the door and into the chassis post.

That was then and this is now, and now it his high flex silicone wire in the high stress area of the conduit so it should last the rest of the life of the truck at this point. Now to do the other door this coming Saturday morning if all goes according to plan.

The radio of choice today was the sBitx V2 that I ordered back in August. I have had this radio for a little while now and I really like it, it does have a few quirks I would like to iron out, but for the most part the little radio works really well for me. I have done a couple of mods to it that I felt needed to be done pretty soon as it would get crazy hot on a POTA activation. (There is a blog post where I used it a time or two in this blog if your interested that I wrote about before this post.) The main one was that I added a fan to the power amplifier heat sink that is temperature controlled so it cycles on when the heat sink gets to about 115 degrees. I will spell that out in a blog post incase you want to add something like this to your radio. You can put the fan control circuit on any radio and not just the sBitx. I thought it was a brilliant idea to monitor the temp and the fan works so well that it will cycle on for about 1 minute or maybe two and then cycle back off as it has cooled it down low enough to drop out my monitor circuit.

Another huge benefit to using a radio that is basically a computer with an RF deck attached is that you can do things with it that you can only dream of on other radios. The photo above is a perfect example of what I am talking about. This is the bank of TWELVE message memories that I use when operating POTA as an activator or a hunter. To be honest though, F3 thru F8 don’t get used at all, I thought it would work for me but my process flow while activating just doesn’t allow for it at this time so I still send this part of the exchange manually. But the CQ sections and sometimes the others do see a good bit of use. I use the CLOSE memory to give me time to log the contact in my logbook during pile ups. When the pile up comes, I don’t have time to send some of the exchanges and also write so I use this to be able to write down the information for the exchange at times. If things are slow enough, I will usually just send everything though as I like to send CW, it is just nice to have things like this to help.

Another thing you don’t see in the photo that is available, is that you are not limited to 12 memories, but you can open the little box beside F12 and choose another bank of 12 from another menu item, here is the cool part, you can have as many pages of 12 memories as you want, the only limit is your memory on the Pi. It is literally a script you fill out and save in a folder on the Raspberry Pi. That is just plain awesome. Another thing that is nice is that mine has the Real Time Clock module and if you will notice it knows what the time is so I don’t have to try to use my phone to tell the time for the contact info. If I were to work on it a little harder, I could even do my logging on the radio as it has logging software built in and can be configured to work with the mode you are using. I just like to log on a paper notebook myself and have not bothered to learn it. That is what the section right about the macros is for…

All in all it was a great outing albeit very short. I did have to get back home pretty quick so after I cleared the small but rather exciting pileup, I called CQ a few times and when I got no answers I called QRT with 20 QSOs in the log. Two of those QSOs were DX too! One was Canada and the other was Spain of all places! The Spanish station was booming in as well, very loud to my hamstick. I don’t know if he sent back a 599 because I was also just as loud or if he thought I was simply sending a contest style exchange, but it was nice to work him none the less and I did it with 25 watts too, for a 30 minute activation, that ain’t bad in my book.

All in all it was a great time to get out and make some contacts and to use the sBitx out in the field too. (Which is what I bought it for to start with.) So more to come from this wonderful little radio and my park adventures! Until next time, 73 and get your radio out!

WK4DS

The simplest radio and antenna setup I know of…

Ok, first the setup. I get the opportunity to do some ham radio on the big island of Hawaii. It is with about a two week notice and we are flying. Of course, I have this primal fear of my check baggage not making it to the destination with me or ever for that matter. So I have to carry my radio in my carry-on bag… with me. This bag has to house the radio, power source, antenna and any accessories I need as well, such as CW key, headphones, etc. The other bag will have my camera gear so it is pretty much full already. I will balance the load to get everything in those two bag though.

This is the little radio I finally decided on, the Elecraft K1.

So now you understand what I can take is a small QRP radio with a simple wire antenna and some sort of battery. It will be a cw rig, which typically perform better at QRP power levels anyway. At least this is what I have seen when attempting to work POTA with SSB at 10 watts… The radio I initially chose was the Penntek TR-35. It is really small and has all the bells and whistles I like to have on a POTA outing (which is what I plan to do while there) and I just plain like this little radio. I started immediately working on a resonant antenna for it so I could fore go the tuner and quickly realized that wire antennas are not really reliable for resonance without a lot of extra effort on site. Moving the wire around will change SWR. At least it did while I was experimenting with radiators the other day. I spent several hours with my nanoVNA and an EFHW and found I could easily get the SWR maladjusted by simply moving the counterpoise so I have some more homework to do on that before I am up to speed on that kind of antenna.

This is the situation so far, so now what do I do. Well, the solution is to use a different antenna and that means either bringing a tuner or some other kind of antenna that is more bulky. Well, due to space constraints, I chose to use a different radio.

Backing up and punting, so to speak, I chose the Elecraft K1 and a random wire antenna. The K1 that I have, has an internal antenna tuner that the TR-35 lacks so I don’t have to contend with getting the antenna just right once on location. This is a huge bonus since now I dont have to deal with possibly having something happen to the antenna and not being able to get an activation. I can tune just about anything with the K1.

So what does the kit look like now? I have the following:

1. Elecraft K1 (4 band radio with ATU)

2. Gemini travel key

3. 41’ random wire with various radials

4. (8)AA battery pack for remote power. Emergency backup.

5. Small earbud headphones

6. Messenger bag style carry bag to house the goodies. (Peak Design Everyday Messenger)

7. Notebook and pens for logging

8. Throw line and weight to get antenna in the trees

9. Misc. little widgets like the BNC to screw lug adapter and a power cord for the cigarette lighter socket in the car.

10. 8Ah LiFePo4 battery with charger.

There is probably a few more little items I have not mentioned here but you get the idea. This will allow me to setup a QRP CW station and work some epic DX stations that I normally dont hear at my home QTH. At least that is what I am hoping for…maybe I will actually be able to work some of those Japan calls I keep seeing in the evenings! Now I have worked QRP for a long time and I am fully aware that I may not even hear the next island, it is the nature of the beast. But I can usually squeak out at least the ten needed for an activation. So I am hopeful that it will work out. The only caveat is that I will have 2000 miles worth of ocean in basically every direction so the take off angle of my antenna is really important. I am hoping there will be a tall tree so I can get it as vertically oriented as possible. This will give me my best shot at getting an activation.

Oh, to be honest, I am pretty sure that this is not the simplest radio I have ever had, but for a portable system that will cover multiple frequencies effectively, the Elecraft K1 works really well. I really think this rig is a great combination of features and it is sad that Elecraft no longer makes this radio. If you love QRP then I can recommend this little radio…as long as you can live with just 4 bands and CW…which I can.

So there you have it, the radio going to Hawaii… wish me luck!

Stranger (Ham Radio) things... have happened to me lately with QRP.

As you know, I have been active lately with POTA (Parks on the Air) and have been going to the local parks near me and activating them regularly. I occasionally get an anomalous call on a band that I shouldn’t get, (due to my compromised antenna or low transmitter power…or BOTH) but simply chalk it up to them have REALLY good antennas pointed straight at me or a tropospheric duct opening or some such, but let me tell you a story about a man named Dave…(cue the Beverly Hillbilly’s music)

I have gotten calls from Alaska with my poorly arranged and noisy wire antennas in the past and a few from our friends “across the pond” in Europe with my lowly 5 watts of transmitter power, but nothing like what happened on the 27th of August 2022.

On this day, I literally had a window of time that was one hour in length, that’s right, just one hour to setup, get an activation (10 QSOs minimum) and take it all down and stow it away. I could not go to my usual location because it was in the wrong direction and would have put me being late, so Cloudland Canyon was out of the running, I only had one choice really. The only location was the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Military Park as it has two sections, one in Georgia (the Chickamauga half) and one in Tennessee (the Chattanooga half) the Chattanooga portion was literally on my way to my meeting so I started looking at the map to find a suitable location that complied with the POTA rules for an activation.

So I find a location on the west side of Lookout mountain right off the highway and drive to it, only to find that there is nowhere to pull off of the roadway. Upon learning this I start exploring my way around the northern end of Lookout Mountain and found a spot called Eagles Nest with a “pull off” big enough to get my vehicle out of the road safely.

I hurriedly set up my radio on the back of my truck and string the antenna horizontally out through the opening along side the trail and across the sign in the photo literally draping it over the sign and tying it into a tree to maintain the horizontal layout just to get the antenna off of the ground a little bit. Then I quickly threw two of my 10 foot counterpoises out on the ground and tuned the radio with the automatic tuner. I did not get out my external battery to save set up time. Since I was running off of the internal battery in the radio it limits the output power to 5 watts automatically.

As you can see from the logbook entries, I started on 40 m and worked my way up to 20 m. As expected I was getting my more local states on 40 meters such as Kentucky, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and the like. Similarly with 20 m I was getting stations a little further away like Arizona , New York and Maine. This is completly normal for me on a POTA outing too. Then… right after I finish with Maine, I here this call sign fading in and out somewhat and could have sworn the first letter was a “Y”! So I had him repeat it a time or two to confirm I had copied it correctly and there it was on the logsheet right in front of me…YC2VOC!

I had no idea at the moment, just how far away he was when we heard each other. So I worked him as a POTA contact and by the last time he had repeated his call, I could hear him pretty well. Still with a little QSB here and there, but I was certain of the call sign at this point. Here I am thinking I am going to hopefully get an activation in with the limited time I have and I get this amazing dx call back from my CQ!!! You see I have never heard that part of the world on my radio before. I don’t have great antennas (if your new to ham radio, it is immensely important to have good antennas to reach the farthest parts of the planet from your location) nor do I have them at elevation for proper gain benefits either. This means I normally hear the US, western Europe and some central America for the most part… I just couldn’t believe my ears that day.

There are numerous places on the web to get the great circle distance like I have here, this one is part of Log Analyzer 3.2. This maths out to about 500 milliwatts per 1000 miles or better said, 2063 miles per watt! . The conditions were just right between him and I that day to make it work with only 5 watts of output power on my end.

I want to say thank you to Galih for working with me that day to get the contact in the logs and tell all of yall reading this blog, that if you get out and turn on the radio, you just might have a conversation with someone in Indonesia!