Moving out for POTA at US-0716

Some days are better than others…

Today saw me putting the truck in the shop to get the water pump repaired as it gave up the ghost on the interstate. It got to ride on the big truck to the mechanic and I have been driving my back up truck ever since. The old white ford is a good truck that we normally relegate to shop duty for deliveries and such but for now it is my daily driver. This also means I have to transfer all my gear over from the Dodge to the Ford and I inevitably forget some stuff. This time it was the AUX cable so that I can run my phone through the stereo…So I have been wearing my AirPods instead. I also don’t have a bed cover like on the dodge so I can’t just leave my radios on the back of the truck and have to take them in the house when I am not using them. This is mildly frustrating since I like to use my truck for a POTA wagon and just have it constantly outfitted with the gear I use.

This is what the operation center looked like today. It is nice to sit in the shade and work some contacts when it isnt too hot. I still used the antenna on the truck mount and just ran the coax out into the grass. Today saw the sBitx V3 deployed again so I could work some CW as well as FT8 quietly while other people rode bikes and enjoyed lunch in the park. I wound up sitting on the hard shell case for the Argonaut as a sort of makeshift chair and it worked really well. I also sat the radio on its hard case to raise it up as well. What POTA activation would be complete without a cup of good chain store coffee? Lol…

As you can see, the antenna worked out quite well on the old ford. I was quite happy with the results even though it was thin on total contacts. I like the fact that I can simply back into a space and setup my antenna right there in just a couple of minutes. There are times that I wished I had a better antenna but you use what you brought and have fun. I did have fun so it is all good. I do have some really good wire antennas to work with but I don’t like trying to string them up in places like this. I am almost certain that it is against some sort of rule in the national parks.

Here is an interesting note about this activation. One of those fancy-smancy Tesla cyber trucks rolled into the parking lot while I was operating and I immediately got this broadband RF hash all over me radio. When he shut the truck down, the hash disappeared and as soon as he powered it back up, it returned. So I am convinced they need better RF shielding of something. You can see it on the display on my radio above.

I am still on the fence as to whether I like the aesthetic of the Tesla Cybertruck or not. Hard to say to be honest. I do like the power availability idea that you can POTA for days from it. It is battery powered after all… Haha…once you shut it down that is…

Until then I will be using my 36Ah battery. This is a Lithium Iron Phosphate battery and is shockingly light for its size and performance. I can run literally for days on this one cell without problem. You can even run several hours at 100 watts if you wanted to… I normally have this plugged into my shack for a backup power system in the event of power failure so that some of my radios continue to work. Mainly my VHF/UHF machines so I can talk to the locals either on the repeaters or via simplex should there be some sort of emergency. On some days though, I will take it to the field with me to make some POTA contacts and this was one of those days.

31 contacts in the log is a great day for me. I had so much fun and even got a bunch of DX into the log! What more can you ask for? Nice weather, ham radio, DX, POTA…it is almost more than you can handle!!! HaHa. Thanks for following along and I hope to see you again in the next one.

72

WK4DS

Testing the DROK 5 volt regulator for the sbitx V2/V3 Amateur Transceiver

Tests were done today and the results are in… the DROK adjustable voltage regulator is a clear winner in my sBitx V3 radio. This is a simple multi-choice voltage regulator circuit that can be used on a whole host of applications. That row of SMD resistors across the top is for fixed voltage applications and then there is a small potentiometer in the upper corner for the variable voltage applications. I just dialed the potentiometer down to 5VDC and called it good… Let’s take a look at what I found today when I compared the results of the old voltage regulator to the new DROK regulator on the oscilloscope.

When you buy these little power supply circuits, they come attached to each other and you simple pop one off to get it out to use it. So I broke one off the set and soldered a set of header pins into it and then connected it to my homebrew variable bench power supply, then also to my HP 8840A/AF bench multi-meter and my Siglent Technologies SDS1202X Oscilloscope. This allowed me to vary the voltage applied to the input and to measure the output voltage as well as see what the quality of the output voltage looked like. Now, to be fair, I didn’t load either the original unit or the new one, this is simply static voltage output being viewed for cleanliness.

The below photo shows how it looks on the workbench when you have a power supply, a scope and a multi-meter all connected at once to a tiny little circuit board…haha.

I first connected the old one to see what it looked like on the scope and to be honest, it didnt look too bad at 13.8VDC. It has some noise on it, but it was not too bad. But then I thought, “You know, my truck power port is more like 12.4VDC so lets lower the input voltage and see what the waveform and output voltages look like. This is where things got real interesting. I found that the noise was akin to a sort of high frequency ringing and the scope could not get a clean trigger on it. So instead I turned on the persistence mode and then set it to a 1 second decay rate so it would build up on the screen and this gave me the visual that I could share that is relatable.

All of the input (13.8 to 12VDC) voltage adjustments that I did only changed the output a few milli-volts, it was so little change that I didn’t even bother recording it. I adjusted the output till I was at 5.0872 volts, this is only a 1.7% variation from 5 volts so I figured I would be good to go here. The original was off by more and it worked too, so there is also that.

The first photo of the oscilloscope screen is from the new DROK voltage regulator showing the output from the new board. The variation is less than 80mV as you can see the cursors are not right down on the waveform, so I figured it was close enough for what I was doing. Might have been 75mV if I had gotten really close… Adding the persistence to the waveform allowed it to fill the screen and gave me a bar I could more easily measure.

Below is the original voltage regulator with the supply voltage at 13.8VDC. I was intrigued by the fact that a higher supply voltage made the device work better. So my Astron RS-35M power supply was making it work better in the shack where I was trying to recreate the problem from when it was in the truck…lol. You can see how the wave form has grown with all the signals below the main area of concentrated garbage. With a 1 second decay rate the old wave forms would fade out after 1 second so it would not simply fill the screen with a yellow bar. I really like these new oscilloscope features. These are all in the megahertz frequency range too…

Below is what the old regulator looked like with the voltage reduced to 12VDC. Look at all that RF hash! What a terrible DC waveform… It has completely filled in the 1 second decay rate with trash. This measures about 137mV so if you do the simple math of 75mV and 137Mv you come up with about 50% reduction in RF hash on the 5VDC bus. That is a solid 3dB of noise that I removed or in ham speak a full S unit…(At least that is how I understand it). That is a pretty significant amount in my book and I for one am glad the email group found these devices and shared it with the rest of us.

I call this a win. If you have an sBitx V2 or V3, this is a worthy upgrade and it really is quite simple to install. You have to solder in some header pins (you can recover the ones in the old voltage regulator if you don’t have new ones like I had today) and simply plug it into the header on the main board and your done. Remove a few screws, unplug a few connectors, solder in four pins, unplug the old and plug in the new, reconnect the plugs (they are all different so you can’t put them back wrong) and put back the 6 or so screws and your done. Literally 20 minutes start to finish. I wished I had done it sooner knowing what I know now, I have had my DROK boards for a couple of weeks at this point…so sad… You can get them from Amazon for real reasonable money too. here is the link to Amazon if you want to get some for yourself.

Link to DROK mini regulators

Dual radio POTA activation? Sure!

Today I setup both the Ten Tec Argonaut V as well as the sBitx V3. This was because i was not sure if the sBitx V3 would hold up the entire time. You see, it has had an ailing 5 volt regulator for a while and I was planning on replacing it later today, but first… POTA!

So I go to US-2169 and setup in my usual spot and get out both radios so that I can work CW on the Ten Tec if the sBitx flakes out on me. It didn’t, but since I had already gotten it out, I used the Ten Tec Argonaut V anyway and worked what CW I could with it. You see, today was another day that I stayed above 20 meters the entire time. That was the plan from the outset and it was quite successful too. I love using 15 meters in particular since it goes over seas easily for me. I will usually work several DX stations if the band is open and today is no exception. I worked 5 DX stations over an 18 minute span of time, not bad for a 15 watt radio… I worked so much FT8 is short order that I almost didn’t need to setup the CW station at all, but I wanted to work some CW anyway so I just got on the air with it and this is how it went.

The operating position was a little crowded today but not too bad, I used the hard case for the Ten Tec Argonaut V as a table of sorts to sit the radios on so I was able to move them back and out of the way of my writing surface. This left plenty of room for the nanoVNA and my other small items I use when activating a park. I have gotten really comfortable with setting up like this, I can set this up in just minutes and it requires zero use of the park infrastructure (such as trees or picnic tables) over the parking space I would consume either way and some space for my radials.

So in a previous blog post I had mentioned that I was going to use the smith chart on the next outing to show how you get way more information about the antenna under test with it instead of the simple SWR graph and here it is. Contained below is the 15 meter plot from 20.5mhz to 21.5mhz and the marker is resting at the upper limit in the photo. The center line across the chart is purely resistive measurements, anything above this line is inductive and anything below this line is capacitive in nature. As you can see on the display, the line representing the span I am looking at, 20.5 to 21.5mhz, is all above the line showing that my antenna system is inductive in nature so it will have some inductive reactance to the signal. The very center of the chart where the smaller circle intersects the line is 50 ohms - resistive (right below the flag from my measurement). As you can seem the further you move away from this point, the further from 50 ohms you get.if it were to be something like 100 ohms, you would need a 4:1 transformer to correct the impedance mismatch, this is why antennas need transformers. The characteristic impedance of the antenna is not usually 50 ohms which is what the transmitter is designed to see.

In the second photo I have switched the chart over to a simple SWR plot versus frequency and you can see how it is easier to read for the lay-person. It does give you the data you need in the firld really quickly and make it easy to know if your antenna is short or long and if your radials are good to go and such. This is what i use most of the time in the field to just make sure the antenna is presenting a good load to the transmitter.

In the above photo I learned something strange about the sBitx today. The two clocks don’t have to be synchronized to work. FT8 is not time forgiving, your radio time marker has to be fairly accurate (within so many milliseconds or maybe a second or two max) or it wont make connection at all with the other stations. As you can see in the lower photo, FT8 worked perfectly and I made several contacts with this mode so the computer clock must not matter at all… I don’t know what is going on here but it works so I dont question it.

Today saw a bunch of DX early on which always makes my day. But all in all it was a great day for POTA and I was stoked to get 21 calls in the log. Until next time, dust off that key or microphone and see if you can get a park or two into the log.

David

Scout…ing for contacts POTA style

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

Vintage gear is sus…

When you buy older radio equipment, it is a good idea to check inside before getting on the air with it as this article details about my Ten Tec 277 Antenna Tuner. Sometimes things are lurking inside that neither you nor the person you got it from know about.

I have had this tuner for over a year and have done park activations with it. The 277 also sees extensive shack lately with radios like the sBitx and Penntek TR-35 and such. I had noticed the other day that the sBitx was exhibiting some odd behavior on transmit and when connected directly to a dummy load, it acted normal. So I pulled the cover off of the tuner to have a quick look inside and this is what I found.

These two photos show both problems I found inside when the cover was removed. The first thing I saw was this burnt resistor, which goes to the SWR meter circuit and the wires were broken on the balanced line transformer.

Fortunately for me, neither of these actually impeded performance in how I used the tuner except maybe from arcing on that transformer where the leads were broken if it was still close enough to enable an arc... Probably not though so I am not sure there. The resistor is the 68 ohm resistor on the print that I found online. It looks like it is a simple load resistor to allow the diodes to sample from and was probably overheated by pushing a little too much RF through the tuner at some point in the past. With 86mA of current flow through this resistor, you are at the power limit of 1/2 watt. Doing some simple ohms law, that turns into 5.848 volts across the resistor. I should count the turns on the transformer to see what the primary voltage would have to be to make that happen… lol. That is a whole different rabbit hole though so let’s continue.

When I found these things I decided to go to the internet and see if I could find a schematic of this tuner. Well, the internet did not disappoint. Below is the schematic for this exact tuner.

The bottom half of the page is the schematic for my tuner as it has the SWR meter circuit in it. I printed out the schematic so I could have it on the bench with me during the repair process.

Something I have noted about Ten Tec prints, they lack critical information about things like the transformer ratio or the turns count on the tapped inductor on the matching network or even the turns count on the balanced line transformer, or even the rating of the little meter movement, none of these are present on the print.

To replace the resistor properly involved having to remove the circuit board from the tuner. This involved having to remove all the knobs as well as desoldering several wires to all the board to lift out of the chassis. I will take photos of the areas where I remove wires like this so it is easy to see how to reconnect them later. This is a bonus of the iPhone for me, it allows visual records to be kept in real time of things like this.

Once dismantled, I set out to replacing the resistor first. Sometimes the power rating of the component is just as big of a factor as the value, and I didn’t have a 68 ohm 1/2 watt resistor in my parts bin. What is a guy to do? Well, it turns out that if you put two 330 ohm resistors and two 220 ohm resistors all in parallel that you get 66 ohms mathematically. Mine measured out to about 65.7 ohms or something like that and so I added a 2.2 ohm resistor in series with the other four and BAM! 67.86 ohms! .002% accuracy is good enough if I had to guess, and I upped the wattage rating to 1 watt as well since the four higher value resistors are all 1/4 watt each and they will bear most of the burden of the power dissipation work anyway. (Probably a little less actually since more current will obviously flow through the 220 ohm resistors than the 330s but it will still be way over 1/2 watt total capacity now…) I put it together like you see so it would more easily fit the hole spacing on the circuit board as well as stand up the four parallel resistors to allow better heat dissipation.

Once I had the new resistor installed, I remounted the circuit boar5d and proceeded to reconnect every thing that I disconnected. This is also when I decided to rewire the transformer to the balanced like connections on the backplane as well. With all that done, I reinstalled all the knobs and was ready to test it out.

One last thing I did was tuck the print inside the chassis so that next time who ever is in here will have the information I didn’t and will be able to solve their problems that much easier. Kind of a gift to the next generation as this thing is really robust to be honest about it.

All buttoned up and ready to go back into service in the shack. Thanks for following along on this little adventure.

73

WK4DS

Tire station…

Today saw me wanting to go activate a park as the weather was wonderful and I had a little time to go so I headed over to my usual location at US-2169 (Cloudland Canyon State Park) and went to the frisbee golf course parking lot. But then as you see in the sign below, it says Ascalon Trailhead… Well, read on to see why.

Meet N4ARV (Anthony) who was setup with his FX-4CR portable station. He had already strung a nice long wire up into a nearby tree to work some POTA SSB in my usual spot! We chatted for a few minutes and we agreed that since I also wanted to work 20 meters (he was already on 20 at this point) that I would head over to the Ascalon Road Trailhead to prevent our radios from overloading each others receivers. I could have probably just went down to the canyon rim lot, but I knew Ascalon would be quieter so I hopped in the truck and was on my way.

Anthony had a really tidy little kit that he was operating out of today, the battery was really small too. It was right up my alley… haha. Just what I need, another radio…The FX-4CR is a powerhouse of a machine too. It is loaded with features that would make a full size radio blush! He was working SSB and it looked like he was not struggling at all either. Hope to meet him again at some point.

Once you get to the Ascalon Road trailhead, you are greeted with a little reminder to pay for your parking. I am exempt from all this mess though as I buy the annual pass, which for a POTA op, is worth it’s weight in gold since you will be in parks all the time.

I think I have activated 42 or 44 Georgia parks so far on this pass. If I had used the kiosk each time that would have been over 200 dollars in parking fees. Instead I have my annual pass which is only 50$ and my renewal isn’t till July. Last year I got over 100 activations on that pass making average parking costs only 50 cents per visit…not bad for what you get access to.

As you can see below, I pretty much had the place to myself. There were a few people that are behind my truck and are out of camera frame, but midday on a weekday is when I like to activate as you get the run of the place for the most part. I found a shady spot and parked there so I could setup on the bedcover, but as it turns out, the truck was on a slope that made the shady side about 5 feet off the ground. I knew at this point that I had to get creative with the radio location. I have setup like this once before already and I think it was with the same radio too, but today I setup with the whole little mini-station and it still fit!

Meet the “Tire Station” location of my POTA setups. I only have about 4 locations that I use. The truck cab, the bed cover, a random picnic table (basically I will use any available picnic table) and the “tire” station. I don’t think I have setup anywhere else in over a year other than these four positions. It works well with a folding camp chair, which I keep in the truck. It is also at the perfect height for my CW listening operations so I don’t need headphones as long as the rest of the area is still quiet.

Today also saw the introduction of a new piece of kit for me. The aviator knee clipboard… This widget is the perfect tool to hold my notebook and I could even stand up and get stuff out the pack or what ever and it would stay put. That was awesome to say the least, and is a great addition if you paper log like me. I don’t know how I got by so long with out it now that I have it.

As you can see, the clipboard make a little table of sorts that I can sit my stuff on and still work with the radio and such. I highly recommend this device for POTA ops. I got mine for Christmas, but if I had to guess, it probably came from Amazon… Just don’t forget that this “table” is attached to your leg and if you stand up, all the stuff on the table will go for flying lessons immediately.

I have memorized what the four knobs control, this frees me from having to look at them to control what they do. First knob is keyer speed, I use it to slow down for slower ops mostly, but I usually set it by ear anyway so I dont have to see it. Second knob is RF Power and it is set and forget, I dont change it during the activation at all. Thrid knob is RF gain and I use it to control the noise floor, I will usually turn it down a little to lower the band noise, but will turn it up to work a weak station. The last one is AF Gain (AKA Volume) and I use it a good bit, mainly when I get a really strong station coming in, I will back it down a little then, and then bring it back afterwards. But I use three of the four enough to memorize what they do so I don’t have to look at them. That is a huge benefit to such a simple radio, you simply memorize what each button, switch and knob do and you can operate the radio in the dark. I could run this radio blindfolded. I don’t think it will transmit out of band so I am pretty sure I could literally operate it blindfolded…only problem with that is then I couldn’t log…lol.

Another little addition to the radio that I really like is the S meter I built for it. I am thinking about changing the way it connects currently though as it needs the 3.5mm socket on the same side as the 4 pin plug. This would help tremendously with the arrangement of the little station at times and I really need to do it soon…lol. I also need to rework the power cable on the power box/speaker unit to be a little longer too, I dont know why I made that cable only 6 inches long.

Today saw a great run on 20 meters in the time I had allotted for the activation. As you can see below, I made 29 contacts in about 45 minutes at QRP power. Not bad for me. I enjoy the challenge of using small radios at these parks to make contacts like this. I will occasionally use larger radios too, but this is my jam…

I hope you enjoyed coming along for an activation with me and hope that I will work you on the air at some point.

Broke out the Penntek TR-35 for a change.

When you dont use a radio for a while it is almost like having a new radio…

This radio has quickly became on of my all time favorite radios. This tiny radio has everything you could ask for in a CW machine…EXCEPT for an internal antenna tuner…but I digress. In the past I have had the Elecraft K1 (a couple of times actually) which does have a tuner (both of mine had the tuner) but it was not as intuitive to use. That is why I sold it and got this one instead. It is a better radio in my opinion… Even missing the antenna tuner, I prefer this little radio to the K1, now this comes with some needed caveats as it is not really fair to compare these two radios directly. You see the K1 was design around 20 years ago and the TR-35 my more recently with much more modern technology and features. The stability of the TR-35 is uncanny compared to the K1 which would drift a little till it warmed up. Still the K1 was a wonderful machine for my needs and I used it to activate a POTA park on the island of Hawaii last year, so it is plenty capable.

Due to the weather improving I have moved the “shack” outside and setup on the bed cover to get some sun and fresh air, plus it is easier to work since I can spread out the gear somewhat.

I like these hamstick antennas so much that I am thinking about making a tripod mount for them so that I can setup at a nearby picnic table and use them with an elevated counterpoise concept… I could even get them higher above the grade this way too, possibly improving performance a little.

So this is the whole station today, the hamstick on 17 meters with a 15’ coax to the common mode choke. I put it on the nanoVNA and the resonant point was high, and I think it is from the fact that the 17 meter counterpoise wire have some broken off of them which makes them too short for a tuned circuit. But nonetheless the SWR measurement was plenty good enough to use, so I got on the air in short order. To try to compensate for this, I added the 20 meter radial that works so well for me now in the past on a bunch of bands. (I should probably measure this wire and make a new since it is getting frazzled) but it didn’t help very much today. I left it anyway as it did seem to help a little…

The operating position today… I really like using the bed cover for the operation position as it affords me the most user space I could possible imagine as well as it is simple. I have activated with this battery 3 or 4 times at this point and it is still over 13 volts!

The key for today is the Gemini travel key. This has turned out to be a wonderful little key and I am so happy to have bought it. It works so well.

As you can see from the log, I had a great day on 17 meters and even landed me a DX station! Jan was in the Netherlands when I started hearing his callsign! It was awesome that he could hear me too!!! There was some fading of course, but he could hear me! I made a good bit of notes about the activation in the log today where you can see things happening like when I lost a QSO outright to some one tuning up on top of me…for a long time… There is another note about the time when someone had a messed up car ignition that created some broad band noise and I couldn’t hear anything for a few minutes till they left.

Two days- Hamcation and two POTA parks!

Well, it has been two quite long days to be honest and I am tired while I type this up. BUT, it has been incredible to say the least. I have heard about Hamcation for years, but I have never actually been able to attend until now. I will also be honest and say that I was not prepared for what I found, nor did I really expect to find what I found as well.

Of course, I am leading with a photo of me and Tony N3ZN as he makes wonderful Morse code keys, one of which I have and use for my POTA activations routinely. It is always good to catch up with Tony if I have the opportunity. Shameless unsolicited plug – if you are looking for a really high-quality Morse code key, then this is a wonderful place to look, just saying.

Every organization you could imagine was represented at Hamcation. People from the ARRL as well as the Long Island CW club were there, among others such as AMSAT and the local boyscouts troops and so on.

Some notable things that caught my eye were this giant double Tarheel adjustable dipole seen above, as well as the full line up from Flex Radio as seen below. Well, this is the Maestro control head but they had everything they offer up and running so you could play with them. These are some really nice machines to be honest about it. The display is also a touch screen so that is why there really isnt a need for a ton of panel mounted buttons. I do like having buttons, but this is me hanging onto legacy machines that the bigger the radio the more features you could cram onto the front of the radio had back in the golden era allowing for easier access to the functions. The Elecraft K4 shown below is the perfect blend of touch screen controls and panel mounted buttons in my opinion.

Now for something that me and Trey started back a couple of years ago. We would search out all the Ten Tec radios to see what all was out there for sale just to see. Well, below are all the Ten Tec radios that I saw in the bone yard. Some are actually marked as parts machines. This is new for me as normally they are marked as working perfectly (whether they are or not LOL). There was one amp that was marked as a project, probably due to failed tubes that are no longer available and would need a fairly extensive modification to use different tubes. It would be worth it though as the filtering in Ten Tec gear is superb.

Anyway I was surprised that this was everything as there were ALOT of vendors setup in the bone yard. Pickings was a little thin for the brand. To be honest, the main brand I saw on the used gear tables was ICOM and then Kenwood right behind ICOM with a few Yaesu and one Elecraft K3 that I remember…

Below is the new Elecraft KH1 pocket HF transceiver. This radio is going to do two things really well. SOTA and travel radio will be revolutionized by this machine. The fact that is is so small that it is basically the size of a modern smartphone and can talk around the globe, has a built in key, battery, antenna tuner, antenna, logbook AND pen is insane! I really like the concept alot.

I did buy a radio though it was not a Ten Tec. I bought the 40 meter QRP radio shown below that was built by the late W9SR(SK). It is a 40 meter monobander and is really old. Once I get home, I will update the cable with powerpoles as I couldn’t find a molex to fit it at the whole show and then I will test it some into a dummy load to get the power and make sure the frequency is still right and then it will goto a park! His brother was selling some items and this was in that lot. I am glad to know some of the history on it and hope it works right so I dont have to spend a lot of time figuring out how it works internally. Lol.

Speaking of POTA… this is how I did Hamcation this year. Teresa and I are actually staying in Tampa for these two weeks so I drove up each day for the show. Arrived about 8 and since I am “media”, could check in and get photos and talk to vendors a little about things prior to the show opening. This is how I got most of my photos of the booths. Then right around noon or so, I would leave and head back towards Tampa and along the way, stop at a POTA site and get in an activation.

The first one I got plenty of photos and was in the shade the whole time and was outside, the second was none of that. HAHA

I love operating from the bed cover of the truck with the N3ZN key and my Ten Tec Argonaut 5 radio with my Hamgadgets Memory Keyer. This whole rig just works so well and is so fun to use.

This is the first park and was a lot of fun. I setup on 20 meters as I wasn’t sure about band conditions and such and didnt want to take too long, but as you can see in the log, that never was a problem. The little Ten Tec Argonaut 5 works like a dream, I easily secured the activation in 30 minutes and was still back home before 6PM.

The next day I did the same thing with my schedule but with a park that was closer to the Interstate exit so I had longer to operate. I only got one photo of this park and it was of these giant birds walking around in the parking area while I worked FT8. These birds are LOUD when they “sing” if you can call it that. They were maybe 15 feet from the truck when they would make the call. Did I mention that it was loud? Good grief that startled me when they did it the first time!

Since there was no shade at this location, I faced the truck away from the sun, rolled down all the windows and setup in the cab where I was out of the sun. I ran the sBitx radio today since I wanted to work some FT8 as well as CW. This worked great as I had the activation in the bag in no time but wanted to work some additional contacts for a while so I went back to FT8 and made several contacts there while I transcribed my log into HAMRS so I can put it on the POTA site.

Notice on the map just how close the pin is to the interstate in the above image. That was a really nice perk to this park, it was easy to get to and not far off my course heading back to Tampa.

The above photo is a dramatization. Lol. This photo is from a different day but it looked EXACTLY like this duri g this activation as well, I just forgot to get a photo since I was in a hurry.

I hopped on 15 meters at this park, being curious as to how it would work and boy did it! FT8 ran really strong and then CW came in for many great contacts and then I worked 8 more FT8 contacts before shutting down the station and heading home. 41 contacts total with several into Europe on FT8 which is awesome! With my time running out, I packed up the radio and headed back to Tampa for supper with Teresa. This was a great weekend for me as I was able to goto the Hamcation in Orlando AND activate two POTA parks as well! How much better can it get???

I hope you enjoyed this little AAR about my weekend at Hamcation. 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!

Tallulah Gorge K-2202 AAR

Activating Tallulah Gorge K-2202 AAR with photos!

Today saw me leave Maggie Valley and head south as I had to be at the Atlanta airport at 6PM to pick up the girls on their return trip from Belize. Since I was going to have all day to complete a 3 1/2 hour drive, I figured I would take my time and stop at Tallulah Gorge State Park and do two things. The first was to activate the park as it is a POTA park and two was to goto the canyon and get some photos for my photography video I am making.

Well I get there and it is sprinkling rain the whole way down and it is basically raining when I park. I debate for a minute if I should activate first or do photos first and my desire to stay dry outweighed my desire for photos. So I set up the sBitx and just the 20 meter hamstick as this produces about 1.5:1 SWR which is usable and I have never had trouble securing an activation like this in the past, today would be no different in that respect although something notable did happen as a result, or so I believe it is a result of the higher than normal SWR… As you can see, all of the parking spaces, negated the ability to back into the space as the area was difficult to maneuver in, so they made all the parking spaces “pull in” at a slant angle. Since I could not back in I did not want to be spreading out a counterpoise wire risking park staff saying something. So I ran it wiht just the antenna…

To start with I wanted to do some FT8 as well as this affords me some time to do some other stuff like setup my logbook in HAMRS and get my station layout sorted and such. I like how automated it is for this reason alone. It also allows me to check things like the antenna tuner since it does those long transmit sessions as well. It didn’t take but just a few minutes to get a half dozen contacts in the log and this mode is not optimized in the v2 software. So after I spent about a half hour on FT8, I went ahead and switched over to CW to see what I could here there. Well, the band was pretty active. I had also scheduled my activation so I was confident that the RBN and the POTA networks would spot me. I did this as I had already been to two parks that didn’t have cell service and I had never been to Tallulah Gorge before therefore I didn’t want to take the chance on it not having service either. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it did, in fact, have great cell service so this part went great. Below you can see how I propped the radio against the storage case I picked up at Harbor Freight and it put it at the perfect angle to interact with the touch screen. I also saw where another ham swapped out the VFO with one off of a Kenwood and it looked great, he said it also felt great too… has me thinking about making one for mine now…haha. Also note that N3ZN key, this is what I was doing while I was also making FT8 contacts, I have been working on finding the right setup for running CW from this location and this is where I put the key today to see how well it would work. It worked ok, but I did end up moving it and there seems to be no location that makes it a solid “the key goes here” spot when I operate in the truck…

Once on CW, I work a little over 20 contacts then this is where things take a strange twist, I decide to continue sending CQ, as the system was working well, and it just shuts off abruptly.  Some simple troubleshooting found that the fuse was blown. So I scramble around and find a fuse that was slightly larger than the one that blew, put it in the system, turned it on, and it immediately blew that fuse as well, so that tells me that something is wrong with the sBitX v2 at this point. It could be the finals in the transmitter, or it could be the large power transistor in my home brew fan control circuit that could have went bad as I did not have a heat sink on it. The fan pulls such a little amount of current, only 300mA, and the transistor was rated for 6 A that I figured it would never kill it. It may not have and it could have been the higher SWR that I was seeing compared to when I normally have the SWR at almost 1.1 to 1 or better. I have heard that the transistors in this radio are on the small side of max voltage and the SWR could have pushed the voltage high enough to kill them… Spoiler alert…that is exactly what happened. Once I got home, I found that one of the finals was shorted completely, I replaced both of them and the radio sprang back to like.

Anyway, with the radio that I was using dead in the water, I decided to switch over and get out the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 radio, and finish the activation with it. Luckily, it was still in the truck from the last time I had used it before the trip. This just goes to show that you should always carry a back up. Lol. This took almost 15 minutes to sort out ultimately and I have a big skip in my logbook because of it, but I was able to get back on the air, on the same frequency as well, and finish the activation getting almost 40 contacts in the logbook before I went QRT.

Once I finished the activation it had also pretty much stopped raining as well so I got out the camera and got some photos of the gorge as well. This park is a real treat and if you have a decent cardio regimen, then taking the stairs down to the cable bridge is a treat, but be warned, the climb out is legit strenuous and is not for the non-athletic individual. You can get yourself into trouble here if you don’t heed the warning signs posted at the top of the stairs.

My favorite camera ever is the Leica SL2 and on this day it is sporting the 24-90mm zoom lens. I chose it because of the zoom as well as the fact that it is weather sealed so I can get it out in the rain without fear of it being damaged.

Below are a few photos I took while hiking down and out to the bridge, sometimes people will do the silliest things… lol.

Hope you enjoyed the extra photos of Tallulah Gorge at the end, I enjoyed capturing them. Until next time, 73.

WK4DS

2 x POTA Activations plus a new to me mode! FT8 has entered the chat!

I have been busy lately so I thought I would combine the AARs for two activations into one report. These went very fast, well, one of them did. the other did last a coupe of hours and involved me doing something very new for me…FT8…just not with the Penntek TR35. It was used to make CW contacts at the first activation.

The first park I went to was my hometown park K-2169 Cloudland Canyon State Park. This is my go to park when I don’t have a lot of time. I also can go to the Sittons Gulch parking area which is much closer than the top of the mountain by a solid 15 minutes of driving. Well, this is where I went and during the week, I can also get to choose my parking space most of the time too. Today proved a little tough but it worked out. When I got to the park there were a few cars already there and they were literally in all the places I like to setup, save one… So luckily for me there was a space in a corner like I prefer to use as it gives me room to deploy my counterpoise wires and not have to worry about people tripping over them.

I also only deployed a single counterpoise element today as well. I was curious if it would heavily affect my ability to make contacts with only a single radial, but it didn’t seem to matter much on this day. Due to my spot, I was able to run it straight away from the truck too for what that is worth. Seems that if I don’t use a radial at all, the hamstick will use the coax and the truck body for the counter poise and I will have about a 1.8:1 SWR on the nanoVNA, but if I simply add once tuned radial, it drops to 1.2:1 and if I add two it is pretty much 1:1 SWR. This is why I always deploy at least one if there is time at all, it helps with my transmission pretty dramatically. I found this chart online and used it as a reference to see what would be the results of better antenna SWR and as you can see, at 1.8:1 you lose almost 10% of your energy and at 1.2:1 you only lose about 1%. This is why I don’t worry about deploying both radials if I am in a time crunch. I also know that there are a lot of other things at play here like radiation pattern and take off angle, but it is pretty consistent since it is a ham stick every time and I cant easily change that.

Once setup I immediately jump on 20 meters to get things going today and it did not disappoint! 20 meters was alive and well on this day with a lot of activity.

Today’s weapon of choice is the Penntek TR35 Amateur Transceiver. I bought this radio last year for this reason alone and it took me a while to get around to using it as I was trying to get my IC-705 up and running at the time. I finally came around to the concept that the 705 just wasn’t for me and stopped using it. Sometimes a radio, even a wonderful machine like the 705, just isn’t the radio you want to use, so I sold it back in August. I kept this radio though as I really love the whole radio, literally the whole thing is as close to a perfect CW rig as I could get. It has every function you need on the surface that you could want and nothing you don’t need. The built in filters are really well done and it can even listen to SSB if you are into that sort of thing. The compact size also makes for another reason I like this machine, it is destined to be my new travel radio replacing the venerable Elecraft K1 that I also sold last August due to lack of use. I do want to add an antenna tuner at some point to this kit so I can use random wire antennas, but for now it has a tuned antenna in the kit.

This is the kit when setup. The Penntek TR35, the N6ARA Tinykey, a set of simple headphones (with an adapter to make it play out of both ears) and a 10 cell AA battery pack. I chose a 10 cell pack as it will give me almost 13 volts when the batteries are charged and I can use alkaline cells in a pinch by bypassing two cells with a couple of dummy cells I made in the machine shop. The kit also includes several pens, a pencil (since they don’t dry out), a Field Notes notebook, a couple of lengths of coax, one of which has a ferrite bead common mode choke built into it, a 40M EFHW antenna with an additional radial for it and a throwline with a weight, everything you could need to get the little machine on the air.

Here is another thing I like about using my truck for POTA, I can use the bedcover for a table and just spread everything out on top of it like you see in this picture. If I can operate outside I will always choose that option, but sometimes, the weather or time just prohibit that.

I had a good run with the little Penntek TR35 as you can see in the log. So if you wonder how well things can go, this is a 5 watt radio into a hamstick on my truck. It is one of the worst possible arrangements you can possibly come up with and I still ended up with almost two pages of contacts. Now if the bands are trash, then all bets are off, but you really don’t need a ton of power to do a POTA activation and have a good time. On to…

North Chickamauga Creek WMA K-3958

The next outing was in Tennessee at the North Chickamauga Creek WMA in Soddy Daisy TN. This little park has not seen a ton of activations and to prove that, just go to this parks page on the site and look at who (with only two activations mind you) in the top activator and also who holds the highest QSO count as of this writing. Yeah, it is me. There have been some people activate this park, but it just doesn’t get the attendance of places like The Great Smokey Mountains or even Cloudland Canyon State Park. I don’t understand why either, it has easy access and is pretty close to town. Maybe after I write about it and give it some notoriety it will see some more attendance…who knows?

I was here on a Friday during the mid day hours, so the park was pretty much abandoned except for me and a couple with their dog in the river bottom. I setup in a spot where I had room to deploy a radial and got the sBitx v2 out this time as it has a mode built in that the Penntek TR35 does not…well actually it has a bunch of modes that the Penntek doesn’t have, but this radio is special in that it will do FT8 natively in the radio. Yeah, no computer, no sound card, no setting up complicated software, no figuring out how to get the computer to talk to the radio and vice versa. You just choose FT8 from the mode list, dial up the frequency, set a few things like your call sign and grid locator and hit Call CQ. Now, the radio is a beta version of sorts and it has a few bugs to work out, one of them is currently in the FT8 section too, as long as I am calling CQ and a QSO ensues, the whole thing works like clockwork, but if I answer another operator’s CQ it has a glitch and wont sequence correctly. So I can use it for now, but only if I call CQ. Even so, it still works and I made almost a dozen contacts on this day with FT8, so I am happy about being able to use another mode on activations.

Here you can see a QSO has just finished with WD5BFH and the radio even logged it for me! Oh yeah, it even has a logging program running in the background to log your QSOs as well. I really like this radio.

Here we have the antenna layout for today, the single radial was really close to 45 degrees due to the slope behind the truck. That made the SWR even better and I was stoked to get on the air and see what I could find out there in radioland.

I am also testing the reserve capacity of this 8aH battery I bought last year off of Amazon, I keep turning the power up higher and higher to see if the battery can handle it and today saw me using 30 watts of power for almost two hours! I shut down the activation because of time constraints and not because of the battery so it works great for my needs.

Once again I was able to setup on the truck bed cover, and I am acutely aware that I need an easier logging process. Hand written logs are nice, but they are slow to transcribe. I am thinking that I too can come into the 21st century and use a computer to do my logging…I know, I know. I have really railed on battery powered devices, but at some point I guess I just need to bite the bullet and get a computer of some sort for logging. I am thinking of using a Linux based OS for this as these seem to be more reliable and do not update and crash all your stuff… windows, I am looking at you.

This display below is not how it looks when booted up for the sBitx V2 in the native configuration. I have scrolled it down to be able to see the top QSO in the logbook so I can confirm the QSO did in fact get logged when running FT8. The photo underneath this one is what the screen looks like when opened initially. The screen has more information than can be displayed normally so since it is a web browser layout, you simple scroll down to see the other intel. Things like the on-screen keyboard, the logbook and the macros (message memories) are what you find when you scrll down. But the way I have it here is an efficient way to run this mode for me as you can see everything you need on one screen. Sorry for the reflections, it was tough getting this frame outdoors.

This is the native layout at startup.

You can see the time stamps for the FT8 contacts are pretty spread out. This is a function of my operating skill level being low and the lack of “responding to other calls” being buggy with this mode. I know this because the band was on fire that day.

All in all I had a great couple of outings for POTA and radio in general. I hope you enjoyed these after action reports and look forward to seeing you again soon!

73

WK4DS

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

K-6307 Herky Huffman/ Bull Creek WMA Activation AAR

This was a spontaneous activation of sorts… we went from Melbourne FL to basically Tampa today and on the way I had about an hour to get in a quick POTA activation. So I get on the app and start looking for parks along the way.

So I decided to go to K-6307 Herky Huffman WMA and I chose this one on purpose as it is literally across the street from another POTA park K-6330 Triple N Ranch WMA and on the map there is a road into Triple N Ranch less than 1/4 mile from the parking area at K-6307 so it isnt a 2fer but they are close enough that I could feasibly activate both in a short time. Just pick up the gear enough to drive down the road to the other entrance and park there to do the other park. Seemed simple enough, well it wasnt as it turns out.

The calendar was in that box you see in the above photo. It was nice to know if there was a hunt going on or not. You know to avoid bullets and such. Lol.

So off we go and immediately leave the hustle and bustle of Melbourne and it turns into farmland surrounded by wilderness all at once...or so it seems. A stark contrast to the coast for sure just a few miles away. It was kinda neat seeing the stark contrast like that actually. It just showed us how close nature really is sometimes if you want to go see it.

This is where I chose to setup today at K-6307. It is a parking area for the Herky Huffman/Bull Creek WMA and the truck is so far back next to the fence because that was in the shade. It was in the mid 80s and in the sun that gets hot pretty quick. When I did an about face from the same spot, you see the next image(below). I am standing on the shoulder of the road. This is a different POTA park…so close yet so far away.

As you can see on the above image, the road literally divides the two parks and is in neither of them so there is no way to get a 2fer here. BUT if I can gain access to both then I should be able to get a little 2 park rove instead, at least that is the idea.

Well, I drove down the road a little to the gate for Triple N Ranch and it was locked. Figures, you win some, you lose some. With that I decided to simply operate at the other park as long as possible instead. This netted almost 40 QSOs into the log which is awesome! The hamstick really is a great portable antenna for ops such as this where time is kinda short and deployment would be tough for a wire antenna as the underbrush here is really sharp…

Once I had a spot picked I had to move the truck back and fourth a little to get the antenna in a spot where it didnt touch any tree branches so I could radiate as good as possible. Especially since it is near the tip of the antenna and that is where the voltage is the highest. Also in the essence of saving time, I once again only put out one radial as this speeds up deployment a good bit and seems to net almost as good results.

Also of note is that we were in transit between two towns here as well so Teresa decided to simply take a nap in the truck while I operated from the bed cover. That is a luxury of CW that voice modes do not enjoy, quiet operation in low noise areas.

Below you can just see the radial running away from the truck and wait till you see the QSO map of how well it works!

Here is the operating position for this activation, the bed cover. If you will notice, you don’t see the battery. This is because I am powering the rig from a power cord I made up and put in the cab for winter ops. It is wired straight to the batteries with a fuse and powerpoles. It is just long enough to reach the bed cover if I set the radio in this location. Pretty smooth if you ask me. Lol. I like to spread the stuff out if I have room so I don’t bump a knob or something. The only knob I typically use once I setup on a frequency is the multifunction knob for RIT control occasionally. I adjust CW speed these days on the picokeyer so that is lifted from the radio too. Super simple operating procedure to be honest.

This is what it looks like to have decent band conditions, a 15 watt transmitter, and a 20 meter hamstick with a tuned counterpoise radial attached to it. This is a good day in my book. This happened in just under an hour too so not too shabby if you ask me. I had a good time so that is all that matters to me. LOL.

Once my time had ran out, I called QRT and we headed on down the road to our next location for the night. All in all it was a great day for POTA even thought I couldn’t net two parks in one day. It just means I need to return to the other park now to activate it…that is a great excuse to go to Florida! Until next time, I will look for you on the bands!

72

de WK4DS - David

Activating K-1832 Anastasia SP in Florida!

Today I got to activate another new-to-me park! Anastasia State Park (K-1832) located in St Augustine, Florida.

Today was a special day for two reasons. The first reason is I am in St Augustine Florida and the second is that I had about an hour to fit in a POTA activation. So I drop off the wife at the yoga studio and from this parking lot I have about 1 hour and ten minutes to goto a park, setup a radio, get 10 contacts, tear it all back down, grab some photos for the blog post and go back to the yoga studio. I can report that I was successful in the mission.

So I chose Anastasia State Park because of its proximity to the yoga studio. It was a 7 minute drive to the spot where I setup the radio from the yoga studio parking lot…there goes 14 minutes of my 70! Part of the game so we are off!

There is a park access fee to use Anastasia State Park. It is 4$… Not bad for such a lovely place complete with a snack shop and even a restaurant from what I could tell. Not to mention THE BEACH! Did I mention it has BEACH ACCESS?!?!? Well, it is some of the most beautiful beach I have seen in the mainland USA to be quite honest about it.

The scene above was down the street from where I setup for the activation. This is the life! As you can see the salt water (The Atlantic Ocean) was also in close proximity so propagation should be good! It also had good “facilities” at this location too as I had just finished drinking a bunch of coffee… lol This is not a perk I am used to having at most locations. There is a restroom at the canyons edge back home at Cloudland Canyon next to the parking lot but my usual spot at the frisbee golf course has no such luxury so I was glad to see it today. Sometimes its the little things that make all the difference…

The location I chose was next to the shop where you rent small watercraft like kayaks and such. Since it was a Monday morning there were practically no people there. In the photo above you can see the sand dunes at the beach in the background. This is a good spot for POTA. Salt water has a reputation for being one of the best ground planes in radio and I normally dont have access to salt water so I get really excited when I can operate near salt water.

The parking area is on the side of the road (notice the wind swept trees, isnt that cool?) and backs up to a fence so I backed in and set up the 20 meter hamstick on the truck. Since time was of the essence here, I opted for a single radial and ran it over the fence and out into the recreational space on the other side. I threw the nanoVNA on it right quick and the SWR was good at 1.3:1 so on the air I went! I opted to hop straight way on 20 meters as this band usually has the highest percentage of operators of all the bands. This proved to be a wise decision too as I secured the activation in short order thanks to the plentiful hunters that sought me out today.

I get setup in the truck and power on the radio to a very active band, also giving me hope! So I start calling and it doesn’t take long to get a reply. Then the gates open! Wow! There were so many hunters! I actually got a little overwhelmed and couldn’t send code for squat!!! (Apologies to all of you guys and gals where I butchered your call sign trying to send decent code) So I just took a deep breath and started with the loudest stations and cleared the pileup in a little while. Since I was in Florida and not at home I could hear stations that are normally deaf to my radio and antenna combination. I logged several Tennessee contacts today and even one or two from the west coast!

I might modify this operating position just a little more with time, but it is almost perfect now. I would like to make a small stand that sits in front of the armrest that will hold the N3ZN key and PICO keyer allowing me to move the logbook a little more forward. Currently the bottom of the page is hard to reach for my old back as it is almost behind me. Lol. But other than that, this staion setup is going to end up being my wintertime POTA activation setup for the upcoming winter.

Looking at the QSO map shows that the skip distance today for my hamstick lies in the 500 to 1200 mile range and the second hop is coming down on the west coast. The signal reports on these stations (west coast) today were rough. I struggled to copy the call sign on one for certain and probably both. Still got them into the logbook though so we are good. But it did reveal to me how much energy is lost in that second “hop”. It was significantly weaker copy on those stations. I am going to speculate that it was probably 6 full S units of signal weaker. I dont use the S meter as a strict reference but today I found myself comparing signals such as these weak ones running in the S2-3 range and the Tennessee stations booking in at S9!

When I am back at my home the west is still difficult but at those times I normally have both counterpoise wires setup and this seems to alter the takeoff angle a little and I will get Utah, Colorado and Arizona and even the Dakotas sometimes so the other counterpoise seems to make a big difference in lowering the take off angle some to improve propagation to those areas for me. I am also fortunate to be where there is an abundance of ham radio operators so I can easily secure my activation due to the sheer density of hams most of the time. Actually I have only failed to secure the activation one time and that was my fault entirely, not because of a lack of hunters, but me not calling where they were hunting… Anyway, that is another story and is in the blog somewhere if you would like to read that sometime.

Looking back over the log and seeing all those Tennessee contacts makes me happy to know that I was able to activate a park in Florida even if it was only for an hour, it was still a great time and I was able to get a bunch of people into the log that day that is always a good reason to activate! Till next time…

73

WK4DS - David

Finally got my sBitx V2 radio…so I went to a park!!!

Quick synopsis is I like it. Read on to see why.

When you see this radio, you think it is like one of the big name machines. It is not. It is actually so much more because of the nature of the project that it comes from.

The HF Signals sBitx V2 is an evolution in their radio designs and brings so much to the table that is cant be described in one blog post…well maybe…I can write as much as I want in one post…lol.

The TR-35’s magic is the lack of menus.

The first thing you notice it the lack of buttons or switches like my Penntek TR-35 has on it in the photo above. There are simply two knobs and a display and that is all you are greeted with at first glance.

Well this is a kind of sleight of hand trick as the display is actually a touch screen and almost all of the controls are driven from this display. In fact, what appears to be at AF Gain (volume) knob, is actually like the multi-function knob on my Ten Tec Omni 7 being selectable for an array of things it can control.

Both knobs are also push buttons and the smaller one defaults to volume control if pressed, but the larger (VFO) knob doesnt appear to do anything when pressed, I can not find anything in the literature describing it so it is there for tinkerers from what I gather. You see, this is an open source SDR, this menas you can download the source code and if you are savvy with coding, you can add features or modify how the radio works to suit you. This is the point of the whole project to be quite honest. This radio does work, but it is not as polished as a big brand machine as it is intended for the owner to go inside and play with things, like add circuits or modify existing ones or even write new features to add to the radio outright. You can literally download the schematic and the actual source code from their GitHub… What ever you want to do, this radio is fully “unlocked” so that you can do it.

Enough about the radio in general, how did it do on the first outing to a POTA park? Well, it did really well, I did power it from the truck battery which means I had to setup in the truck somewhere so the power cable would reach the connection I have in the truck. (I finally added a power pole cable inside the truck cable that is fed directly from the batteries so losses are a minimum.

Back to what I was saying, I got to K-2169 and setup in the truck so I have somewhere to sit this time as I planned to stay a while today and didn’t want to have to stand up the whole time. It took me a few minutes to get it all organized, but once I did, everything fit quite well. I wanted to use my N3ZN key, but to be honest, this arrangement literally made it impossible, so I defaulted to the little travel key I have used so much over the last year. I didn’t have a table top that was convenient to setup the other key on and I even tried to sit the N3ZN key on my clipboard, but it was just too difficult and I kept running into problems trying to use it. Hence you see the Gemini cw paddle in my hand for this activation.

Once I settled on the key and radio, I chose 15 meters to get on the air, the band was wide open and even the propagation report said it would do well… Well, FT8 was rocking pretty strong (I tend to use these guys for my beacon report on a band), so I move down into the CW area and start calling CQ…and I call and I call…and nothing. Seems either no one was on the band or they simply could not hear me. It did appear that the band was fading in and out pretty bad though as the RBN would give me a great report one minute and then it would go 3 minutes without a single update. So after what seemed like an eternity on 15 meters, calling CQ with no answers I caved and went down to 17 meters to see what I can scare up.

The hamstick collection at this point. 15 (Green), 17 (Brown), 20 (Yellow), 30 (Blue) & 40 meters (Red) are all represented here (well, 30 meters was on the truck when I took this photo)

So since I had not edited the memories in the sBitx V2 yet for my use, I planned to use the PICO Keyer I picked up a while back, well it worked somewhat, I think it had trouble keying the radio because the radio is looking for contact closure and not a semiconductor so it would work, but it was introducing errors into the code pretty bad. I finally threw in the towel and just used the key the whole time and ran with it. This turned out to work really well though and I really didn’t mind it after all. Once I got home I built a complete set of memories for the keyer complete with all sorts of messages. You get as many memories as you want, they are in sets of twelve, I tested this by copying the CW1 memory and renaming it then I edited the messages and saved it, rebooted the radio (just as a precaution) and the new set of messages were right there in the drop down menu! They are really simple to edit, but you need a keyboard to do it. I didn’t take one with me on this trip hence I didn’t bother with trying till I got back home. If there is demand for it, I will detail how I added a memory and show how to edit the messages and the message names as well.

So I ended up using almost 4 Amp Hours of energy on this activation. Not bad for over 50 contacts in the log. I am happy with that! When I am going to be at the park for a while, I will get all the antennas out and sort them by band like you see below. Well, they are not sorted at this point, but imagine that they are for the story. Then I can change bands quickly and easily as I will lay them near the mount for the truck. The 2” PVC pipe is maxed out too. I don’t think I can get another antenna in it at this point. If you plan to run hamsticks, I recommend that you get some sort of tube to store them in to protect them. They are not very durable in construction so it would be best to try to store them in a way that will make them last.

You see, I know the radio is transmitting as I have been using it at home for the past week or so before taking it to the field. So I get down to 17 meters, find a clear frequency and start calling CQ here. Well things pick up for me here as I get a few answers so I know the radio is in fact working as it should and I didnt do something to it while I had it taken apart… More on that later when I talk about the mods I did to this radio right out of the box.

So after messing around on 17 for a few minutes I hit a dead spot, so I figure it is a good time to QSY down to 20 meters and see what I can find down there. Well, I found all the ham radio ops in the United States and some from across the Atlantic too! I proceed to make over FOURTY contacts in an almost continuous stream in about as many minutes! I was busy! The radio was working great too. At this point, I clear all the callers and decide to try the lower bands for a minute and see what I can do there.

So I hop on 40 meters first as this antenna has consistently been on the upper edge of SWR for my operating preferences, and the sBitx agreed with it showing about 2.1:1 while I was there. Also of note is that the radio self adjusts the output power based on band and SWR from what I can tell. I was running about 20 or so watts on 20 meters and wihtout changing the power setting at all, jumping on 40 meters netted me 9 watts output into the 2.1:1 SWR where on 20 meters I think the SWR was closer to 1.2:1… So I turned up the drive some in an attempt to get the power out consistent across the whole activation. I didnt get it past 15 watts if I remember right… But it was enough to make a few contacts and get some in the log from more local hams as the 20 meter band hops right over the closer states.

Then I finally moved up to 30 meters to see what it could do as well since that was the only antenna I had not tried yet. Well, 30 meters also did not let me down…like 15 meters did… haha. I got it on the band with good SWR and output power and easily made several QSOs on that band to finish up the HF portion of this activation.

The next part is just for fun, but I also recently got a new HT (Handy Talky) radio and was playing with it while out on this day. So I called into the KG4WBI/R 1.25m repeater to see if Roger was monitoring and he was. So then I asked him to switch his radio to VFO and simplex so we could make a 1.25m FM UHF contact. 5 watts was more than enough to make the trip the roughly 3 or so miles it was to his house from my location! So I netted 54 contacts on this day on 5 bands and two modes. I had a great activation and the sBitx pulled quite a long shift on it’s first outing.

Now to discuss some issues I found with the new radio that I am going to look into solving or upgrading. The first one is actually really easy, it needs a fan… or two. The heat sink got SO hot in the two hours I was in the field operating at about 20 to 25 watts. REALLY hot, the whole radio was hot actually and I think this is what made it start doing the next issue..

This is something I noticed after a while, when the radio is getting really warm, it starts to “stutter” in the refresh rate of the screen. I am thinking this is due to thermal throttling of the Raspberry Pi processor in an attempt to prevent sudden death from overheating. I confirmed this was not due to ram overflow by swapping the Pi out with a second one I own that has 8GB of onboard ram and it did it too with minimal use “on the air” back in the shack at home. So my solution is two fold, one is to install a fan on the main heatsink for the power amplifier in the RF deck and a second fan pulling air through the radio chassis where the Pi is located in an attempt to cool the processor as well. I know this will increase current draw from the battery, but I am not concerned with this as my activations normally don’t run over two hours at a time and this limits amp hour usage to usually no more than 3 or 4 amp hours, which even my smaller battery can handle at this time. If adding the fans runs the draw up to 5 amp hours or even 10 in an activation, then I will just take a bigger battery since this is not a backpacking radio in my book. Also, it did work at 25 watts down to 15 watts, depending on band and SWR, for the whole activation. If I were to just turn the power down to 5 watts, it probably wouldn’t get warm enough to matter on the power amplifier considering the size of the heat sink on it. This means I will probably install a small toggle switch to manually cut the power to the fans should I want to run it at true QRP levels in the field. I also plan to wire the fans through a circuit that will automatically turn them on and off as needed to prevent them from just drinking the battery dry when they are not needed. This involves a small temperature sensitive resistor called a thermistor in a voltage divider and a transistor to flow current to the fan. This way if the radio doesn’t get very hot, it wont come on at all. I think I did the math on this device and it will bias the transistor base at about 105F degrees, which is about right for it to protect the electronics. The processor cooling fan could be done the same way (and probably will) but I don’t want this fan to be very large so I am searching for a small 12 VDC fan for this application and also I want to see if I have room to install the processor heatsink, which is not currently installed. This alone will help tremendously, but with long activations the heat will eventually soak the heatsink and we will be right back to square one. This is why I want to add forced air flow to the system…

Even with all the heat buildup, the radio trucked right along and I put over 50 contacts in the log on the first outing! I even got some from overseas in the log!!! It is always good to get some DX in the logbook. I really liked this radio for a station that will be near the truck. The reason for this is that it is fairly large and heavy compared to my other radios, well maybe the Argonaut 5 is similar in weight. This is one of the reasons the Argonaut 5 doesn’t go on activations that stray far from the vehicle too. That guy is heavy, and it is a fairly fragile radio like the sBitx V2. So who knows what I will end up using it for, but for now, it will be one of my POTA radios.

All that aside, the radio works really well for the most part and over time this will be a wonderful little rig to run on activaitons. I plan to get it going on digital modes as well so I can work contacts on FT8, PSK31 and RTTY as well since it does all those modes natively and without the need for an external computer. This was one of the main reasons for getting this radio, I really didn’t want to have to bring an additional computer to the field to do digital modes… Anyway, with all that said, I packed up and on the way out found a few deer wandering around the area and I was able to get a photo of one of them. That was just icing on the cake for a day with so much activity and fun and getting to use my new radio. So until next week, get your radio out and go make a contact with it!

POTA Activation AAR and some antenna testing.

Let’s take a look at hamstick antennas and see how they perform without tuning the counterpoise for each band.

No POTA outing is complete without some good ole McDonalds java to get you cranked up. I normally make my coffee at home but today I was in a bit of a hurry so I went through the drive through and picked up some of their magic water. Today I chose the Sittons Gulch parking lot at the bottom of the mountain as it is significantly closer to my home compared to the upper lot. Google Maps says it is a full 15 minute drive from one lot to the other. So operating from here gives me an additional 1/2 hour on the air. That is awesome.

So I setup the station in the truck today and learn a few things that I didn’t know before. One is that the power port on the dash I use is not great at carrying the load of a 20 watt radio. I can see the voltage dip to almost 11 volts on transmit. This is not good. So I opted to switch to the battery and get the voltage back to where it needs to be. This means that I now have another side project to fix this socket… But I am also going to install a direct power feed to the cab of the truck for my winter time ops so I can power the radio off of the truck batteries directly and install a anderson powerpole outlet inside the truck.

Today saw the battery deliver another 2 amp hours of supply, that is four total so far for the 8 amp hour cell. If I get 6 out of it at this point, I will be happy. It is over a year old at this point and it is still going strong. This is not some big name brand battery either but rather some cell I found on Amazon last year. It has seen many activations too. I used it heavily when I was using the Icom IC-705 and kept it in the backpack with the radio. Then when I transitioned to my Penntek TR-35 I used it with that radio for months. So this battery has seen a significant amount of use. I am impressed.

Another thing I have been doing is testing the antennas on the same set of radials (the set I tuned for 40/20 meters) and just switching out the vertical radiator only. I was pleasantly surprised at what I found out today to be quite honest.

Ham-stick antennas work shockingly well for what they are. So well in fact that I am about to go on a 10 park rover operation and use only the 20 meter ham stick (unless the band closes then I will move… lol) for the whole event. My strategy being that 20 meters is the most popular band by far so I should be able to get ten contacts at each park pretty easily. This should give me the best odds at completing my rove and making it to ten in one day. Below is the report from my nanoVNA showing each band I have a ham-stick for and just using the same counterpoise every time. (Side note here, I was also deploying the counterpoise differently too so as to keep them out of the way and this also affects the antenna, see the photo below there is a photo further down in the post showing them). The plots are arranged from the highest band to the lowest but after seeing the results, I don’t think it matters as I dont see a pattern to be honest.

15 meters kinda threw me for a loop. I need to trim the “stinger” some and push this one up into the band more. The null is actually at something like 20.250mhz so yeah, this one needs work. I didn’t have my cutters with me or I would have done it right then. Even so, the SWR was still low enough to get on the air and I was getting RBN reports as high as 20dB which is phenomenal for a 15 watt signal out of a ham-stick several hundred miles away…that is off-tune.

17 meters also caught me off guard. Look at that plot with radials tuned for 20 meters instead! Ft8 on this band will be epic! I have plans to start doing some digital modes during POTA outings in the future so I am happy to see this.

20 meters actually needs trimming too. I have known this for a while, but it is close enough for CW so I have not bothered yet. As you can see, at 14.060mhz on this day, with this radial arrangement, it was still less than 1.2:1SWR. I have had this particular radiator the longest out of my entire collection and bought it last year in anticipation of winter ops. Which it worked perfectly for me in that role. This is why I have slowly collected the set I have now. They just work.

30 meters is honestly the best looking lower band out of the three that I have. 20 is tuned low and 40 needs some help with more radials (most likely), but 30 meters lands just right, with the null point covering the whole band.

40 meters is odd to me. It works and has respectable SWR even with a poor radial field but I would like to see it even better if possible. I think this is more to do with the antenna design and poor counterpoise than anything else. The other bands work great but this one is just not that awesome and I am still sorting it out. Dont get me wrong, 1.46:1 SWR is great but I think it can be alot better. I just need to dial in the counterpoise or something. I am also going to setup another trace on smith chart to see if I am capacitive or inductive and not purely resistive. That might be part of the problem. The SWR plot is nice for simple and quick checks but there is more data to consider. More to come on this…

I did all my tests with the common mode choke installed so I would know what the radio actually is transmitting into. This way I dont get surprises along the way from things not being like they were when I did my test.

The logbook today looked good too. I didn’t have a long time to work the activation so I was happy to see 23 get into the log today. That is a good day for me. I was a little sad though since I was getting picked up on the RBN and could hear stations on 15 meters but no one could hear me… Oh well, maybe next time.

I messed up the sequence and had to correct it. Hence all the scribble in the margin… sorry about that.

Thanks for coming along on this after action report, hope to work you on the air soon!

72

WK4DS

The Penntek TR-35 goes QRO with the OUTCOM OPA-202 Amplifier

You have heard me mention KG4WBI a few times in this blog. He literally has what seems to be a veritable museum of vintage ham gear.

Well in today’s episode of “what oddball, ancient but yet working piece of gear is he going to pull out today” he hands me an amplifier. It is the OUTCOM OPA-202 to be exact and it has a feature we are really interested in. It doesn’t have a keying input which means it is RF sensing only. This stands to reason too as it also takes 1-10watts of RF energy and turns it into almost 175 watts on the output. At least that is what the literature says.

Here is my current test setup for gear, I have a coax stubbed out to the shack bench plus the Astron has powerpoles on the front making for an easy temporary setup location.

Made in copious quantities at what appears to be the end of the last ice age, the OUTCOM OPA-202 was a ham radio amplifier that was designed for 40 meters to 10 meters. Now your going to say, David, I know that…it says that right on the front with the 7-30mhz. I think this was done to target both the CB genre as well as the amateur radio group but I dont know for sure. What is odd is the literature below shows that it is rated for 80 meters too. Who knows what the lowest band it will work on is… I do know it works on 20 meters and 17 meters though as I tested it on both of those bands with my Penntek TR-35 transceiver.

The next thing you will notice is the selection buttons are labeled only for voice modes. This is another marketing ploy to help sell these little power houses. The buttons are actually power output selectors and depending on the combination you can theoretically get up to 175 watts out of this thing. Seen below I have it set to “SSB” mode which turns out to be semi break-in keying and 80 watts out. There are 4 levels depending on how you set the “AM” and “SSB” switches, but it also limits the amount of energy/duty cycle depending on the mode. It actually lists CW in the modes and the output and such, hence I am not running it full tilt. It also has protections built in to keep the over zealous operator from working it to death with long winded conversations. This particular unit seems to produce full break in keying if you select “AM” and semi break in with “SSB” modes. Probably due to the style of transmission coming with each of those modes. AM will produce a carrier the whole time you have the radio keyed and SSB only when you talk. To smooth out the relay action in SSB they have added a 1000 microfarad capacitor and a 470 ohm resistor to the relay keying circuit to keep it closed in just a little longer when SSB is selected so the relay wont sound like a machine gun. Another switch right beside the power switch is the pre-amp switch (REC AMP) which turns on a receiver pre-amp for weak signal work and it actually performs really well. I used it quite a bit and liked in particularly well.

So Roger wants me to … as he puts it… play with it and see how it works. This is his way of giving me something new to write about. LOL Once done, his plan is to integrate this amp into a vintage Field Day kit. This would be a neat little addition to his early Argonaut 2 that he has since it is only 5 watts output at full power.

In the flyer above, the bands go all the way to 80 meters but the unit we have doesn’t list 80 so they must have updated the specs over time for some reason.

Back to the RF sensing part, the reason we want this is it simplifies setup at field day for us. If we want to use QRP power for our ops then we can but if the bands just aint cooperating then we can easily add some power and get things moving. Our goal has always been to see if we can get on the air with QRP first and most years we are successful but occasionally we are not. So this allows us that leeway to be able to add output power as needed easily and with literally any radio we connect to it. We like this design so much that we are going to hijack the RF sensing circuit and see if we can copy it for another little amplifier he has that doesn’t have current sensing. We think it should be a simple thing to build a little project box that goes between the radio and amp that has both coax ports, a 12v power cable and a simple keying cable coming out to connect to the keying input on the amplifier. We even considered using the little 4 pin Amphenol plug so it will look “official” when we build it…hi hi.

Things of note about this amplifier, it has no fan, so it is static cooling only with the enormous heat sink that is attached. Don’t forget you have this monster of a heat sink when you install it in your car too as it will be on the bottom and I am pretty sure it needs ALOT of air to be able to keep it cool enough at full power. Another thing is the meter on this unit is frosted over, but no worries as when you key the radio, a light comes on behind it and lights it up just enough to be able to read the milliamperes DC that are flowing…somewhere…lol. Actually, from what I gather, the meters in these amplifiers were terrible and replacement was pretty common so apparently someone replaced this one and didn’t switch out the backplane so the meter would read right. It is supposed to be some sort of SWR meter from what I can gather by reading the manual.

Lastly, someone has replaced the power cable with new wire…and left the bulkhead connector off so I will add one back if I can find one before returning it to Trey. At least it is fused on both the +13.8 as well as the ground lead. That is nice when the insulation breaks down at the sheet metal and decides to short one of the wire.

Anyway, all that said, his museum piece actually works as I made several CW contacts with it using my Penntek TR-35 QRP transceiver. The little radio has plenty of drive for the OUTCOM OPA-202 so I was easily able to get 80 watts without issue and this was plenty to work one ragchew QSO as well as several POTA contacts. The system looks a little messy on the bench but will quickly clean up now that I have proven it works. So until next time, 72…errrr…73

de 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

The weather can be fickle…

We went to my local park (K-2169) to do a little POTA and to enjoy the nice weather there.

I setup at the canyon rim today in the shade and got my rig setup in my usual tree and everything. I look on the web and the MUF showed that 17 meters was open and I dialed around and did hear stations so that was promising. I tuned up the antenna on an open frequency and started calling CQ…and called and called …and called. No one answered my calls for something like 10 straight minutes. I even had someone respot me once but never heard anyone on the air

I even took a few minutes to confirm that the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and the Ten Tec 277 Antenna tuner were set correctly with my nanoVNA. They were in fact set correctly…so I just wasn’t being heard on 17 meters. Probably because I am only using 15 watts from the Argonaut. Maybe because the band sucked like a Hoover vacuum cleaner that day, who knows…

This antenna tuner is the Ten Tec 277. It has options to connect a COAX to an antenna, a balanced line to the antenna and even a random wire input (which is what I was using on this day) The variety of connections is what led me to acquire it in the first place, I like the ability to use it with any antenna I have and it works quite well in that role. It is easy to tune and the SWR meter works well too. I don’t use it as a traditional SWR meter though, I use it to watch for changes in the antenna system. If the SWR starts to climb then I know something is changing and I need to look into it, I have had things like the counterpoise wire break in the crimp lug before and not realize it due to it being inside the heat shrink tubing and this meter showed it to me. It also works for tuning purposes if I forget my nanoVNA as well.

My nanoVNA kit is almost entirely adapters and the tiny little VNA over to the side. I love this device and wonder how I got along without one before.

Anyway, back to that activation on that day. Since17 meters was apparently turned off by this point, it was with a heavy heart that I QSY-ed to 40 meters. I tuned up and started calling on this band and it didn’t take long to get someone in the log. After getting quite a few “locals” on 40 meters, I shifted my focus up to 20 meters. For me with my low antennas in park activations I will normally get closer states on 40 meters and more distant stations on 20 meters and higher. That is one of the reasons I like 17 and 15 so much. When they are open I have had great performance with DX stations. If you look at the map below, the close in contacts are all the 40 meter contacts and some of the closer ones are 20 meters.

I just love maps like this one where there is this one lone QSO way off.

It was about this time that the storm clouds really started to look ominous on the western horizon. But they didn’t really seem to be moving closer so I kept going. Well, 20 meters was open is all I can say. My very first QSO on 20 meters was with G3WPF in the UK! I actually thought he was an American station and I was missing the first letter so I had him repeat it a couple of times…lol. I am glad he didnt give up as I figured it out finally and got him in the log. What an awesome way to hop on 20 meters with! DX right out of the chute!!!

As can be seen from the logbook, I had a decent run on 20 meters before two things happened at basically the same time. The storm started to move into the area, and another ham tuned up on top of me and I couldn’t hear stations anymore. I chalk it up to them not being able to hear me as I was only 15 watts into a random wire pretty low to the ground. Anyway, that was enough to get me to call QRT and pack it all up before it got wet.

Until next time I hope to hear you on the air!

de WK4DS 72