Activated The Great Smokey Mountain National Forest

Here is the after action report where I finally activated a park in North Carolina. The Great Smokey Mountain National Park is a well used park in the POTA network, but it was one that I had not yet activated in my travels.

This particular area is called the Cataloochee valley and there is a heard of elk in this area that I like to try to photograph in the fall. Well since I was here, had a radio and the elk were not very close either…why not POTA?!? I decided to activate this park the night before and gave myself a decent little window of time to get it done in as well since I wasn’t sure how the elk would be doing… I had remembered from the last time that cell service was nonexistent here so I scheduled the activation on the POTA site the night before just as a precaution. This is a pro tip, if you even think you are not gonna have internet, go ahead and schedule the activation and pay close attention to the time as it is UTC time on the website and don’t do like I did and get the time off by several hours because you chose the wrong time zone… I did this on another activation and the results are as you think.

I found this spot and setup the truck-tenna (a hamstick on a receiver hitch mount I made) and the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 for this activation to just get on the air as I wasn’t sure how long I would have with band conditions being not great lately, so I wanted to stack the odds in my favor as much as possible ahead of time. Well it worked… as you will see later.

Here is a sign that lets you know just how unpredictable wild animals can be… Elk are VERY large creatures so it is prudent to heed this warning… I also thought it was interesting that the park rangers have to put out these signs at all… I guess getting a selfie is more important than getting killed by a bull elk…who knows?

This is what i found on this day though. The whole heard was just chillin in the edge of the treeline, so it wasn’t too heart stopping of an event to photograph them on this day. It was fun to just sit and peer at them through the camera for a while though. I have a video on my YouTube channel that showed a few more photos as well as talks about the rest of the trip some more as well.

Back to the activation though… I ran the coax into the cab as it was kind of cool this morning so I wanted to stay warm while I operated and just ran the cable through the window and left it down a little while I did since it wasn’t raining. This 15’ coax is just long enough to reach in this configuration too, which is nice.

Here we have the operating position today. I just sat the Argonaut in the seat, added a common mode chock and hooked up the HamGadgets cw keyer and my N3ZN tiny paddle and I got on the air. Power for the radio is pulled straight off of the truck batteries if I operate from this location as I have a power cable ran to the cab from the battery with power poles on it just for this. The arm rest makes for a decent desk, but it could be better. At some point I plan to make a table top that sits on the arm rest and goes forward to the shifter and even has a leg that sits on the console to support it as well. This will probably be covered with some sort of cloth so it wont be so rough on the arms and will allow me to spread out the notebook, pen and key a little more.

I could tell that the scheduled activation on the POTA site was working as I almost immediately got a pile up once I went live on the air and the RBN picked me up. It is night and day different as to what you get with and without the reverse beacon network picking you up. One QSO of note here is the Canadian call on the first page. We had quite the QSO and spent a few minutes chatting about things before I got back to the activation and went to work on that. I am not one to shy away from a ragchew even though I wanted to work a bunch of contacts too, it is all about talking on the radio so I love all of it.

I had a steady stream of calls come in for a little over an hour. that is awesome! I love it when I am able to catch what I think is all the QSOs that are calling. The band was really strong today too as I was only using 15 watts and was able to get really good signal reports back from most everyone. It was a really stable day as well as it can also be seen in the log that the signal reports were steady and not sinusoidal. Sixty three contacts later I called QRT to go get some lunch and fuel for the truck before heading on to Ashville for the afternoon. If you are interested in the rest of the trip, I have a YouTube channel where I talk about the photography aspect more. Thanks for coming along and until next time, go get on the air!

72

WK4DS

Counterpoise testing during a POTA Activation

Today involved some experimentation as well as a POTA activation. I tested some changes to the radials I use on my hamstick system out of curiosity and came away with some interesting results. Read on to see the AAR and the results of this test.

Today was supposed to be a quick little activation and then I was going to do a few other things, but plans are made to be changed from what I can tell as the bands were doing well for me and I stayed longer than I planned. But then the sun can bring that full circle as you will see below.

The operating position today shown above, was on top of the hill at the frisbee golf course and on the bed cover of the truck. Turns out that was somewhat of a bad idea. It just got hotter as the day progressed and the sun quickly came over the door I was using to shade me. This is what ultimately caused me to go QRT when I did as I was having a decent run on 20 meters at the time. It was just plain hot, with the sun seemingly cooking my right ear while I was working ops. I did enjoy working several ops today I have seen in my log before plus some that I have not. I even got a Canadian which is always nice.

This is probably the best image of my 40m hamstick and mount I have ever gotten. With the sun in the right spot, the whole antenna lit up well enough for the camera to get it. The setup is not actually mobile as it requires a counter poise to get it to work it’s best, but wow… it worked really well today, especially well today actually for some reason. I can hear surprisingly well on these tiny HF antennas too. I own three different brands of hamsticks (covering 40, 30, 20, 17 and 15) and can not tell a difference in any of them as far as how well they work. They all just work really well.

These two photos tell a story about what was happening at the location today on 30 meters. When people talk about having RF noise at a location, this is what it looks like on a radio that doesn’t have a waterfall display. The photo above is what the noise floor looked like when the RF noise was not present and the bottom image is what it looked like when it started up. It also was not constant, but appeared to by cyclic in nature as it would spool up and would just be some sort of hash for about 20 seconds and then it would just go away for about 30 seconds maybe longer. I would be able to work one contact and then it would come back and if the hunters were not transmitting with an S9 signal, I couldn’t hear them. This is really frustrating and is one of the reasons I don’t activate 30 meters more than I do. But so it life and how much fun would it be if we never had problems to solve? It would get pretty boring pretty fast… Even with this RF hash coming in and out, I was still able to get 9 calls in the log on 30 meters today so I count that as a win anyway.

The next thing I want to share about today has to do with the antenna system I was using. I have made tuned radials for all of my hamstick except the 15 meter unit (I have not deployed it yet, but soon I will.) I went to a lot of trouble to tune these radials too, with a ton of time at home working on this. Well, it turns out that I didn’t need to do that for the 30 meter hamstick at all. I deployed my nanoVNA today and did some measurements on the hamsticks to confirm nothing has changed with them and figured out something just out of curiosity. Seems that the radials for 40 & 20 meters work just fine on 30 meters too. This means one set of radials for all three of those hamsticks. Next outing I will take the 17 and 15 meter hamsticks and tune them up and see if the same radials will work on them too…fingers crossed. I am always looking for ways to simplify my station setup and the radials has been one of the slowest things to deploy of all the gear for POTA with the hamsticks. So if I can get it down to just the two radials and not having to remember the color codes for them and such I will count that as another win in my book.

The above photo shows that the antenna is fine on the 20 meter CW section, even though it is technically low on the best part of the chart, it is only 1.188:1 where I normally work on the 20 meter band. Well, knowing that, below is what it looks like on 30 meters with the 40/20 meter radials instead of the tuned radials I made up for just for the 30 meter band. Pretty crazy huh? Looks almost identical to the 20 meter chart and even almost matches the 20 meter SWR value. I was blown away by how good this turned out and to think I have never even tried it before today… Another thing I noticed about hamsticks in general is that they act like bandpass filters across the HF spectrum, I did open up the range on the nanoVNA and it does have other nulls IN THE VHF SPACE, but each hamstick has ONLY ONE spot they are resonant at in the 0 - 30mhz spectrum. No multiple harmonics like the EFHW, just one really deep SWR null is all you get. So plan accordingly, but to be honest, it works really well so I am not going to complain. I think this might actually work as a band pass filter but have not had the chance to test it yet. Maybe I will set this up at winter field day and see what it sounds like there. That should do it.

Here is the log from this activation and the signal reports look good for a mismatched antenna on the trailer hitch of my truck. I was using 15 watts though so that might have helped some. I have been sending with more power lately to just play with the Argonaut to see how hot the heat sink gets at various power levels and on CW it barely gets warm at all with 15 watts of RF so I am really happy with that. I am doing this test since i changes the fan a while back to reduce the fan noise as the factory fan is quite loud. I have a blog post showing what I did with this if you are interested in that.

All in all I learned something new and had a great activation at the same time. So till next time go get your radio out and make some contacts on it!

Testing a new antenna AND CW key during a POTA activation!

I decided to pack up the Argonaut 5 and go activate Cloudland Canyon today to get some much needed air time and wanted to try out my new POTA key that I picked up at the 2023 Hamfest in Huntsville a little while back (actually you will be reading this in the future as I picked up the key last weekend but so is the life of a blog post) So follow along and look at what I found out today while making a few contacts from K-2169.

I also decided to do some testing of the Reliance Antenna Bugout 40 EFHW I had bought from N3VAN who was making them and selling them on the QRZ forums. The antenna looks really good with lots of attention to detail in the construction. I have never used an antenna that doesn’t have radials or a formal counterpoise at all. This one uses the coax shield as the counterpoise so, in theory, you don’t need a counterpoise at all. (Come to find out, you can bend the rules of EFHW antennas if you do add a counterpoise) I strung it up in the air between two trees out near the bluff at the park. This may have doped my results, but I am doing a test anyway so why not, right? The far end is about 30’ in the air. The near end is about 12’ up to the transformer and I dropped a 15’ piece of coax down to the radio. Done. Well, so I thought at least.

The far end is way up in this bright green tree behind my hand in the back ground. I am pointing to the end of the wire location in the tree.

Once I got the antenna up in the trees, I wanted to see what the plot looked like on the nanoVNA so I plugged it all in and this is what I got. The antenna is technically slightly long and is a little below optimal frequency on this day and rigged like this. I am not going to trim it at this point as I want to see what it does in other kinds of conditions like the winter and maybe right after a rain when it is still wet or maybe where it is set up over night and is soaked with dew. Even though it was off frequency a little in the configuration I had it in, the SWR was well within safe limits for operating any transceiver. I didn’t have a 2:1 SWR at any point when I was testing a particular band and that if fine with me if I don’t have to carry a tuner with me. There was a side bonus to this setup too, for some reason with the whole antenna elevated like I had it, it was giving me a wide coverage (read that as a low q) in the bottom of the 10 meter band. So low in fact, that it was within usable range even on 12 meters without needing any sort of a tuner! That is 40,20,15,12 & 10 in one antenna with zero mods needed. That is winning in my book.

This was the plot without anything other than the 15’ coax going to the common mode choke.

Now get this, I added a radial to the system, but in an unusual location. I put it on the end of the coax on the connector next to the common mode choke right next to the radio and just stretched it out over the ground. This length of wire was 9.5’ in length and when I did this, the plot changed a lot. I lost the 12 meter dip but picked up a much broader area between 20 and 15 meters to the point that 17 meters was below 2:1 SWR at this point. This means that if I add this simple piece of wire I now have a “no tuner needed” antenna that covers 6 bands! Almost everything is usable…sans 30 meters, so I am really happy with this antenna. The next time I set it up will be to test it as a sloper like it would be used if it is a portable setup and I had only one tree to rig it to. Then we will plot it again and see what I come up with. I am curious to see if the frequency of the dips changes with the relation of the end of the antenna to the ground. I dont think it will but RF is a fickle girl…lol.

This plot is the aforementioned setup plus a 9.5’ length of wire tied to the coax connecter at the common mode choke.

This much wire is all that I needed to gain access to 17 meters without having to carry an antenna tuner with me, this is very liberating to be honest. Just adding a small radial to the system makes this super easy to use. The Reliance Antennas 40m Bugout EFHW comes with a winder to store in on as well as a carabiner clip to connect the far end to the cord. The transformer end has an eye bolt that works well for a hoist point to raise the other end of the antenna.

I next setup the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 radio on the table and connected all the stuff to make it work. Once it was powered up and ready, I plugged in the star of the show, my new N3ZN CW Key. He builds some really nice keys and I have walked by his table at several hamfests recently and today I decided that it was time to give one a whirl as they say. So I chose the smallest one he had at the show since I wanted it for POTA activations. The plan is to keep it in the Argonaut “GO BOX” that I built last year. It took me two trips to the field to learn to use it properly too. Since it is so small, if you have a heavy hand when you send it will move around a lot on you. The trick is to set the action light enough that you just have to touch the paddles to send the code, this way it is a light operation and the key stays put on the table like it should. These keys come with the cord hardwired to them so you cant buy a simple aux cable and plug it into the key, but it didn’t cause me any trouble so I don’t mind it. The installed cable is high quality and I have no doubt that it will last a very long time.

Once the antenna was squared away and I had my 17m “element” nearby, I was ready to crank up the radio. The new key plugged into the keyer I recently acquired from eBay and we are off to the races! Or so I thought as it turned out that KJ4BAD happened to be walking by and stopped in to see if I was doing POTA and we had a great chat for about 10 minutes or so about all things radio. I always enjoy running into other hams while out at a park.

I really like the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 radio, it has almost all of the CW functions that I use are on the surface. There is a could of things that you hit a button and then make the adjustments and you are good to go. The other thing that is great about this radio is that it has 20 watts of transmitter power. This is awesome when the bands are not as good as they were back in the winter. Also the DSP filtering works surprisingly well. It is also really good with other modes, but I just use it for CW… I might make a cable at some point to put the key into the front socket instead so it is simpler to connect the key. You see the mic key will key the radio so that means my little memory keyer will work in that socket. Who knows when I will do that though…

After we finished chatting I settled in for some POTA therapy and dialed around a little to find 15 was open with a bunch of stations on the air. I setup and start calling and you can see in the log that I only made two contacts before giving up and moving to 17 meters where I usually make several contacts but today I only netted one. Things were looking pretty dismal till I went to 20 meters. Once on 20 things turned around for me. I fairly quickly got the activation and proved out all the gear I had brought that day.

This photo shows where I would place the extra radial on the Coax connector. The coupling between the common mode choke and the feedline made for an easy spot to add it. I simply stripped the wire back a little and twisted the wire over this point. Simple as that. The easiest mod I have ever done to tune my antenna to another band in the history of ever.

This was the view I had today while operating, this is why I like POTA over other activities. The view is epic. So there you have it. My POTA “test and tune” trip in a simple blog post. Until next time, 72.

de WK4DS

2023 Huntsville Hamfest from the view of a vendor this time!!!

Man time flies! It has already been a year since me and Trey had come over and bought all those military surplus cases and stuff! I cant understand how that has happened…

Anyway, I signed up for a table in the “bone yard” which is indoors at Huntsville, which is nice since it means it is out of the direct sun in August and has air conditioning. Well Trey arrives the day of the event and I already have my stuff int he truck, we just load a couple things he is bringing and we are off.

Side notes: Check out the vintage Ten Tec t-shirt I only get out for this and sometimes Field Day, I am probably the only person alive who still has one. I am also monitoring two ham bands here, our 2 meter simplex frequency and our 1.25 meter simplex frequency, We used both over the course of the day to make contact with friends. Back to the story already in progress…

We get to the convention center right on time and find a huge line of cars waiting to get into the show area. Once we work our way through the line we figure out these people are parking in the underground parking lot and we need to go to the back to unload the truck, well we get out of line, unload the truck and setup in short order. I can tell already it is going to be a good show for me when I can’t even get the truck parked before Trey (who went with the stuff to the table) is already being pummeled by dealers wanting to buy my stuff! This is a good sign!

By the time this photo was taken, the Icom IC 705 and tuner were sold. It literally lasted 5 minutes. this is good as the proceeds from the sale of this radio went to purchase the sBitx radio that I want for POTA instead. I had also already sold one of the two power supplies I took over as well. Common items seem to have went really fast to be honest.

Here, Trey (KG4WBI) Is getting settled in for the long arduous day of minding the table. Also, at this point I still had the Elecraft K1 pictured here as well. More on this radio later.

Once the doors opened, it was a free for all till about lunch time. It was REALLY crowded with so many people that it was hard to imagine the total number of participants. Everybody seemed to have a radio, even the little kids!

Things moved off of the table steadily all morning though and I had high hopes that I would actually achieve my goal of not taking any of it home with me! Each little item, one by one, would get picked up and bought by some enterprising person looking for the find of the day. I was happy to help them too.

After lunch I made my way over to the POTA table and grabbed a photo for the blog, they were pretty busy so I didn’t bother them with my shenanigans but left them to inform the youth about the wonders of ham radio. While out on my stroll I did check on a couple of items I was looking for and stopped to play with the N3ZN keys for a minute as they are SWEEEEET! Then it was back to the grind of tending “shop”…

I continued to see the stuff I didn’t use goto new homes one at a time till I was down to the K1, the Ten Tec 238 tuner and the Comet Antenna Analyzer. Then the strangest thing happened. I had to goto the bathroom. Well, that wasnt really all that odd, but what was happening at the table was. Turns out Josh from Ham Radio Crash Course had sent out scouts looking for a K1 or a K2 and they found mine and told him. He was livestreaming the event too! Well, he finds the table and makes his way over to it to find Trey minding the booth in my absence. You can actually watch his stream and see the whole thing transpire, just fast forward to about the 18 minute mark to see where it all starts.

Ham Radio Crash Course Video

A little back story here. I love the little K1, it was a favorite of mine for many years and I have used it off and on for that time. I just took a long hard look at the gear in the shack and realized the K1 sits on a shelf WAY more than not and I needed it to goto a good home where it would see more air time. So with a little sadness, I packed it up to goto the hamfest to find a new home. I get attached to things like this way to much and this is an exercise in decluttering my life, I wanted to move out a ton of gear and not just throw it away or such but turn it into something I would use instead. The K1 is just a plain fun radio to use, hence the pain in seeing it leave. I believe Josh will do a wonderful job at this and look forward to seeing the little K1 on his youtube channel soon.

It was great interacting with him and getting to chat for a minute, he took it straight way over to the test bench and had them check it for operation and he was happy it worked as advertised, All of this is also in the livestream…lol.

Then I had one more trek around a little to pick up a few items I have been looking for and actually found. I got a coax and some connectors from the Wire Man, I got the drop-in desk charger for my old Icom HT I have been using lately and it even came with a working radio! So now I have two!!! HAHA, why did I come to the hamfest again??? Then I bought a cable from another cable builder, ABR Industries, and I must say they look really good, I wanted a new coax for my POTA work and he builds his with common mode chokes built into the cable, that is really nice and i am looking forward to testing this cable on the nanoVNA to see how it compares to my homebrew chokes I made.

Then the finale of the day came when I went back over to N3ZN’s booth and talked to him about a small POTA key. The next thing I know, I bought one!

This key is tiny, at about 1.5” by 1.5”, it will be an awesome POTA key. I am going to look into how I plan to use it and expect there to be blog posts coming soon about it. I also got to talk to the man himself while he filed out my ticket on it and he is an amazing guy, I count it as a blessing to have met him. Hopefully we will cross paths again soon. If I get the chance I want to share with him my keys I built back in the day, we talked for a while and he is one of the few people that can actually appreciate the work that went into making them.

In closing I wanted to share a photo of my current dream rig, the Elecraft K4 with or without the amplifier, I just want the radio to be honest. At some point I will upgrade from the aging Ten Tec radios in my shack and this is probably what will replace them. I love everything about this radio and quietly take a peek at it when I am at the hamfest, but for now, there is POTA to do and contacts to make with the gear I have!

PS: All I brought home was the antenna analyzer and the Ten Tec tuner, both of which I dont mind holding on to for a while longer…

73

WK4DS-David

Ten Tec Argonaut 5 goes to the park and then gets a new fan!

I love this radio, it works so well and is really easy to use with minimal menu settings. Then again I love all TenTec radios and have an unhealthy addiction to the brand…lol. Is it really that bad of a problem? I bought this one “for field use”, you know… like Field Day in June or POTA, but I have found things about it that keep me reaching for other radios most of the time. Let’s take a look at some of these short comings for a field radio that I like to use while doing an activation.

So I get this radio out much less for a couple of reasons… The main one is that it doesn’t have a CW keyer memories built in like the ICOM IC-705 and the Penntek TR-35 have in them. This is a big deal if you plan to activate for more than an hour or so as calling cq over and over manually can be strenuous to say the least with time. You see the keyer does something for me other than relieve me from having to pound out the CQ all the time, it BUYS me time. I am able to make log notes and fill in missing parts of the log while it is happily sending the CQ for me. This is a huge help after a quick string of QSOs and I am getting the times written down along with my usual log notes I like to make.

Quick rabbit to chase here… There is a few notable call signs for me on this page. K9IS is my first Hunter to get to 50 QSOs with me and KJ7DT has been showing up in my log more frequently lately too. The other call is the Canadian, just because he is DX…lol. Always cool to have those DX callsigns in the logbook. Now back to your regularly scheduled chat about the radio.

The next reason I don’t normally grab this radio is that it is fairly large compared to the other radios too. When I am operating in the truck, space is a valuable commodity and I am not able to spread all the gear around easily, if you will notice in the above photo I actually have the Argonaut balanced on my camera bag so it wont be in the way of logging… This actually worked out pretty well though and I think I will come up with something for the other radios to sit in the same area in the future, it was really convenient having the whole surface for my book and key.

The next reason is that the fan is crazy loud and runs non-stop even when I have it turned down to 5 watts for my QRP ops.

A little about the activation today is also in order. I went to K-2169 (my local park) and went to my quiet place at the top of the hill. As you can see, I had the place to myself as usual.

So I get parked, then start assembling the antenna and getting the coax into the cab of the truck when I notice that the cable adapter I have on the base of the antenna is loose, I am not sure how long it has been loose, but it was pretty loose today, to the point the BNC connector spun when I went to install it. This is how I found it was loose. Point here is check those screw together connections from time to time. They work loose too. The one on the back of the radio was loose too… which I thought was odd since I have only used it a couple of times so far.

Although today I didn’t need them, the BNC converter is a nice adapter to have in your kit. I could have used regular PL=259 connectors today, but I had forgot that the antenna and the radio both use them so I just used the same cable I use for the other radios and it worked great.

Another thing I have done is converted the power cable to use power-poles so I can plug it into any power source I use, which now also includes the power port in the truck too. I feel this is a worthwhile thing to do if you plan to work field ops a lot, standardization of the power connectors just makes sense.

I bought this case at the Huntsville Hamefest from Gigaparts and it is for some sort of military radio, but with a little cutting here and there and a little foam here and there it now houses the Argonaut 5 and a MFJ manual tuner as well as a wire antenna and some other miscellaneous items

Me and Roger (KG4WBI) have this obsession of printing out and binding all the owners manuals for all our radios. So I keep this one in the case with the radio and it was needed on this outing to see how to set a couple of menu items I had forgotten about.

Now for the Argonaut 5 Radio Fan…

The fan on this radio is just plain loud, that is the only way you can say it. It is also wired to run non-stop for some reason. This is also a pretty large current drain for no real reason at all other than to make absolutely certain the finals don’t get too hot… At some later point, I plan to make a small thermal sensing circuit that will fire a relay to cycle the fan instead of it just running all the time. but first things first, I am changing the fan itself with one of the low noise fans that another op from a TenTec group shared and it worked really well for them. I downloaded a sound meter app for my phone to see if it was measurable and have the two meter readings to see for myself. Ignore the AVG and MAX values, I watched the meter for a few minutes and did a screen capture of what was really going on to get a more representative number. 65 seems pretty low, but when you are listening for signals near the noise floor, every dB matters so the new fan comes in at 45(44.9 is what I captured in the screenshot and this was a pretty good average from what I watched on the meter.) Now also remember this is an iPhone app and not a legit sound meter, but it does give us something to look at for reference. If it is right, which is possible, then this is a 20dB difference. This is huge as decibels are logarithmic in nature and not linear, this is equal to 100 times quieter! That is awesome and totally worth the effort! To the ear, this new fan is dead silent, I didn’t think it was even running when I turned the radio on actually. So I am really pleased with how this mod turned out, the radio has one less detriment to keep me from using it at parks!

Old fan measured right at the back of the radio.

New fan measured in the same place as the old fan, that is a 20dB change!!!!

This was the ham shack with the Argonaut turned off for reference.

Orderd this little guy from amazon and had it in a couple of days.

This fan is literally a plug-n-play replacement for the factory fan in the radio. I literally removed the case screws, the fan screws, one wire tie on the wiring harness and unplugged the fan. It was the easiest mod I have ever done to a radio…ever.

Something of note, this new fan is thicker and the old screws would not work in my application, but I had a couple of screws in the junk drawer that were about 1/4” longer that worked great so I am back in the game!

The fan connector is a standard computer fan plug so it doesn’t need anything special at all. This is refreshing as it seems everybody wants to use proprietary connectors these days for some reason.

All in all, this has turned out to be a great little excursion in more than one way. I got the Argonaut on the air and I also got the fan upgraded afterwards too. I really like the ergonomics of the little machine so I will see how I can fit it into my regular activations and use it more now. Do you have a radio that you love, but just dont use because of some little issue? Let’s hear what it is and see if I am the only guy that does this.

72

David

WK4DS

Why do I want to buy so many ham radios???

I find myself wanting every radio I see and with a short look through the bios of some ham operators on QRZ.com I am not alone in this.

What is it with this obsession wiht collecting radio gear that us hams must endure? I mean they literally all do the exact same thing…all of them. Yet we want multiples of these radios anyway.

Now, I understand having a base rig that stays at home and can be integrated into several things and it is not simple to break down for portable operations, and also having a radio that can do specific jobs like SOTA or POTA or ARRL Field Day.

This makes sense but why do we want to have two base rigs or three or five or 10 as well as three or four portable radios for POTA as well as mobile radios stacked to the ceiling and we can only use one at a time. LOL.

You see, I am that guy. I have a base station that has two complete radios in it that share an antenna and I also have FOUR, yes FOUR, POTA rigs currently! Four, really? A TenTec Argonaut 5, an ICOM IC-705, an Elecraft K1, and a Penntek TR-35 and I love them all… I just don’t understand the human brain sometimes, why do I want so many radios? I realized this yesterday when the Penntek TR-45L was launched, I REALLY like this new radio and found myself wanting one really bad, but then I stopped and let reason talk to me for a minute and realized that my current radios ALL DO THE EXACT SAME THING!!! To add to the problem, one of the radios is the Penntek TR-35 for crying out loud!!!! LOL!!! Compound that with the fact that I have yet to use it for a field activation and my wanting the new radio is just lunacy… So how do I combat this? Well, the first thing is to get out these radios and take a long hard look at them and decide if I really want to own these radios or the new one. I personally have also set a limit on the quantity of radios I will own as well…apparently there is an exemption for POTA rigs…but I digress. Another thing I have implemented as of late is a rule of balance. This is where I have to remove something if I want to add something. By doing this I keep the stack a little more reasonable and I can recoup some of the money needed for the new radio from the sale of the old one I am letting go to make room.

The POTA rigs are starting to pile up!

Some will say it is because each radio has a feel to it and some radios have character to them and to this I say they are right! I also understand that once you find the radio that you like the most, keep it and the second most favorite as well and then get rid of the rest of them! LOL. Are they really bringing you joy just sitting either on a shelf or worse…in a box under the bed!!!

You see having multiple radios like me doesn’t benefit the amateur operator in any way other than collecting. If you enjoy collecting radios then by all means, buy as many as you want, but remember if you are not collecting radios then what is the point of buying so many? Of course this is my opinion and this is not a rule in any way, shape, or form, but I do have reason in the thought process. What else could we buy with the money we spent on all of these radios had we not bought them?

I also dabble in the hobby of photography and that hobby is no different from Amateur Radio in that the most appealing or “sexy “part of the system is the central piece which is the radio here and in photography it is the camera body. These are universally wanted by the users of each hobby respectively. Photographers will have gear acquisition syndrome (G.A.S.) and make joking videos about it on YouTube because it is such a problem. It is a real thing as companies spend dumptruck loads of money on targeted marketing to tell you that you need to upgrade to the newest widget or risk falling behind in technology. That is how they get you!!! LOL!!! They prey on your GAS problem!!!

So how do we solve for this? I honesty don’t have the universal answer. For me it took about 40 years of buying too much stuff for a hobby and as you see above with the stack of POTA rigs, I am not there yet… I do know that I am starting to recognize it though and I am working towards scaling back the stack of cases so that I have room for other things in my shack. I hope this helps some of you out there to realize the same thing I realized and that you can do other things instead of buying the newest radio. Anyway, now that we have all did some self reflection, reach over and turn on that radio next to you and see who you can find on it.

73

David - WK4DS