Activating a park in bad conditions

POTA activating in bad conditions can be challenging… for some modes. Seems that FT8 doesn’t really care if the bands are crappy and will gleefully allow you to play radio anyway.

This was an experiment to see if the sBitx amateur radio could work in terrible space weather like you see below in the report.

The above and below photo show how fast the band conditions changed on me while activating on this day. The band noise could be seen on the display “walking” across the band segment at times. This band noise would pretty much wipe out what you could hear on the band, but the radio could still decode the FT8 signals so I was able to work almost 20 stations in about an hour even with this sort of noise coming into and out of the band.

I normally dont bother activating in bad band conditions, but this day I really wanted to see just how good FT8 was at extracting signals from the noise. I can honestly say that I was impressed by the performance of this mode. Digital modes have their place and this is very much one of those places. Weak signal in poor band conditions shows just how important it is to use all the modes available to the amateur radio operator. I was once a die hard CW only op and to be honest, it is still one of my favorite modes, but of late I have started getting into SSB more and now I am also dipping my toe into digital modes more and more and I am really liking it. Dont limit yourself out of a stigma like I did, you might just like what you find.

Below is a photo of the display that shows something that i had never seen before and that is the pulsing band noise. That was a new one for me. It too would come in waves and these would last much longer it seemed. The sBitx just kept chugging along though, I would sometimes pick calls and sometimes answer calls and this is what makes FT8 awesome. I couldn’t have possibly made SSB contacts in these conditions…

Here you can see the operating position for the day. Perfect blue skies and nice temps makes for a great day on the air at a park. I had to goto this spot as the lower lot was completely full since the weather was so nice, it was fall and a Saturday. Sometimes going to this spot has it’s perks like lower band noise from the campground inverters and such so I dont really mind it.

I had planned on using a battery and setting up on the picnic table I usually occupy down next to the canyon rim, but there just wasn’t anywhere to park and I didn’t want to wait on someone to leave just so I could park.

This radial is on it’s last leg. I have twisted this broken radial back together for months now and on top of that, the connector on the other end has also broken off. This is almost comical as this is the best performing radial in my set! That is why I am reluctant to repair it at this point…lol. It just works and if it ain’t broke (figuratively) then dont fix it.

I dont know when this bug (I think it is a jumping spider) decided to join in on the fun but here he was playing on the antenna mount. By the time I finished the activation, this little guy was long gone. Kinda fun to notice the little things like this when you are out in the park.

By the end of the activation, I had worked 18 unique contacts and garnered one dupe because I didn’t read my logbook very carefully and called one ham two times…then I decided to attempt to work some CW. This was pretty futile though as I only worked one contact out of about 15 minutes of calling as this is abysmal for me when I work CW. I can usually work about one call per minute even when I am running QRP power levels. So when I only work one…that is bad band conditions. The stations would literally just disappear then reappear and it was impossible to get complete calls so I called it quits after one.

All in all, it was still a great day in the field. Hope to work you soon!

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

Ten Tec treasure hunting #1

I have decided to make this its own miniseries in my blog. Lol.

You see, when ever we goto a hamfest, it has become a running joke of sorts to try to find all or the Ten Tec gear and grab a photo of it. The means anything with the logo on it. Well, we went to the Dalton Georgia hamfest recently and this is what all we found!

There always seems to be an older Omni at every hamfest for some reason…this time there was three!

I have seen this Scout bundle before (maybe here even) and I like the concept. This kit is a bit much for this area though, hence the reason it shows up for sale and not sold… it is a cool old radio, just needs to goto the right person…

I want the Titan or the Hercules amplifier simply to complete the station, I have the whole station other than the matching amplifier… This titan was probably the one I should have gotten…

An HF base rig for 350$ and a Ten Tec no less…is a deal! The Paragon is arguably one of the best receivers Ten Tec ever made too…

I bought the above speaker/power supply as it is a project and was also the correct power supply for the Triton I have at home… I got it “for a song” too as they say, since it was not thought to work, it is a “project” item or a “tech special” as they are called in the radio world. That just means there is a known problem and you go into the deal knowing this. I am comfortable working on discrete component electronics so this is cool with me. It is the matching supply yo the Triton shown below.

I have a version of this keyer at home, these keyers from Ten Tec work beautifully and can be had for a good price most days, like this one. Just make sure that none of the mechanical part s are broken when you buy it and you will be good to go most likely.

Early Omni number 3 for this boneyard. That has to be a record for me or something. The speaker/power supply is for a later version radio like my Omni 6+.

On this tailgate is a genuine hen’s tooth. That automatic antenna coupler is rare. I have one and it works well, albeit slowly, but well. It will match a coax stub 3’ long to the radio… I know… and is plug-n-play with those Omnis on the truck next to it.

All in all, there was a great showing of Ten Tec radios at this hamfest and it gives me hope that the brand wont fade into obscurity anytime soon. I hope you have enjoyed this little walk down memory lane with me and hope to see you again soon.

73

WK4DS

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

A super cold (for me) POTA CW ham radio activation

Well today was super cold to me after spending a month in central Florida. It was 29 degrees and the wind was howling at park K-2169 (Cloudland Canyon) back in NW Georgia!!! I didn’t let that stop the ham radio bug in me from getting out in the cold and activating a POTA site!

I thought to grab a selfie to remind me of how dumb I was to get out in this cold weather so maybe I would think better of it in the future…probably not, but it was worth a try. You can see how I have the door open on the truck, I was using it for a wind break to keep the crazy gusting winds from freezing me solid with wind chill. That is why I logged in the back seat instead of on top of the bed cover which is my preferred location if I am using the truck for ops.

The weapon of choice today? The Elecraft K1 (4 band version with 40, 30, 20, &17) My particular machine also has the internal antenna tuner as well. I guess you could say it has everything other than the internal battery. This is my second copy of this tiny machine, but I have had a long love affair with these little radios. I sold the first one and literally missed it the day i shipped it off. It only took me a few years to find another one like the first one and get my little grubby paws on it…this time for keeps. Of all my QRP rigs, I place this one VERY near the top.

In the photo below we see the Elecraft K1 as seen from the top, I have placed the BNC to screw lug device on the antenna output of the radio and connected the antenna and counter poise directly to the radio with no feedline at all. I did this on purpose to test the system like this for a upcoming project I want to use this radio for in this configuration. This allows me to see how effective it is with a very minimalist rigging. I am wanting the whole thing to be as minimal as possible and still reach the west coast if possible. You see, I have a week in Hawaii and by the time you read this, I should have been there and returned with at least one activation from the Big Island of Hawaii under my belt… only time with tell.

The below photo shows how I took the tension off of the radio with the wire antenna once I strung it up into the tree next to the truck. This is a modified version of a knot we used in the Boyscouts called a taught line hitch. It works REALLY well on tent ropes for tensioning them to the stakes, it also works really well for tying a small cord to the antenna wire to make it to where you can tie it off to something near the radio as well. If you look above at the photo of the front of the radio, you can see the other end of the cord tied to the top cover ring on my bed cover. This end of the cord is tied to the truck with a bowline knot so it can be undone easily when I finish the activation.

Below is the only photo I have ever been able to get of the wire itself and it actually show up in the photo well enough to be meaningful. I threw a line up into the tree and pulled this wire up about 25 feet off the ground with the throw line and it worked really well. I know this is really low for a wire this long, but I was frozen and in a hurry and didnt want to rethrow the line to try and get it higher in the tree. So I used what I had.

OK, so here is the part where I talk about the antenna that I used. This antenna is simply a random wire right at 41 feet long and the counter poise is 13’ long. These are technically not supposed to be resonant on any of the 4 bands I have in this radio, but as it turned out today, the antenna was almost perfect on the 40 meter band with it arranged near the truck body. (it was reacting capacitively with the truck as I could change the SWR by literally moving the counter poise closer or further from the truck. It would also change the resonance of the antenna too, so I used the internal tuner to be safe) I used this to my advantage and worked quite a few 40 meter contacts today. I also cut counter poise wires for the other three bands and plan to set them up and see what the nanoVNA says about them when I have time. Something else I have learned to do over time is to put the wire length flags on the wires. This is simply little pieces of paper with a large number written in sharpie on them and then taped on with a long piece of packing tape to basically laminate them into place. This makes it really easy to know which wires you have without having to guess. All of this wire is high flex, silicone insulated wire and is basically tangle free for the most part, where has this wire been all my life??? Turns out it was on Amazon all along…

Another item I have fallen in love with is these little Velcro cable straps, I don’t know why I didn’t get these sooner, but these things are a wonder of modern technology for wire management and keeping your gear organized. If you have never used them, I highly recommend grabbing a pack of them off of amazon, it will change your life!

So, since I had a way to wander off of 20 meters, wandered I did! I didnt get on 20 meters at all today. Today I stayed on the other three ham radio bands that I could get on and got 16 contacts in about 45 minutes even though it was super cold and I had the power, on the first two QSOs, turned down to 1 watt! Yes, ONE watt! Now, they are only a few hundred miles away to be fair, but still, it is a single solitary watt going the distance here! AA5JF was a little over 200 miles from me and he heard me really well if his signal report is accurate on that little single watt of RF power. The other person (W4EDN) was 265 miles away and I still got a good report. This just goes to show that you don’t need really big guns to have some fun with radio, it is something that even people who can only get small QRP kit rigs and build them can make some contacts. Now, would have I made more with more power? Of course I would, more people could have heard me and I am not contesting that. My point here is people seem to get it in their head that you need 100 watts to be able to have a QSO on HF, when it just ain’t true. Now, I cant speak of phone contacts here as I don’t do very much HF amateur radio on phone modes, I am almost exclusively a CW op…hence the love affair with the K1. So take all that with a grain of Morse code… Once I remembered I was running 1 watt, I noted it at the top of the log and turned up the power to 7 watts (I thoguht I would see how the signal reports changed with 7 times the output power and the log speaks for itself. The first report on each line is what I sent them and the second report is how they heard me. Once I moved to 17 meters I turned the little K1 to 5 watts and left it there for the rest of the activation.

It was easier for me to get some Park to Park QSOs today with the “hunt and pounce” method…but it was more like the “hunt and wait till they can hear me” method actually, all the joking aside, it worked and I got three parks in the log today because of it. I didn’t keep the activation going any longer as I had some chores to do as well as my feet and fingers were getting numb. Numb fingers and toes makes it hard to log and send decent code so I went QRT with 16 QSOs in the logbook for today. All in all, it was a successful trip with me testing all three of the other bands I don’t normally use and the random wire turned out to even be resonant on the 40 meter CW band somehow. What luck! Maybe future me will have written about how my trip to Hawaii was successful and you will see that blogpost in a couple of weeks once I have had time to write it. So till next time, go get your radio out and take it to a part or something.

Winter Field Day K4SOD Style

So to be honest, I didn’t think I would be able to make it to winter Field Day this year, but as chance would have it, we pulled up stakes early and came home the day before. So I went for a few hours to see if I could make a few QRP CW contacts for the guys.

The only photo I thought to take was from when I was outside operating on 15 meters.

Someone grabbed a photo of us stringing up wire antennas in the early afternoon!

This blog would be almost without photos by me as I was under a time table and didn’t think about getting photos as I was enjoying the company of the local hams that were in attendance. I was making some contacts too…albeit incorrectly for what amounted to almost the entire time. More on the lesson learned about this a little later. So, most of the images of HAMs operating are from Josh KN4RTY, fortunately he thought to take photos. I am really glad he did this and want to thank him publicly for giving me some of the photos.

Well, I went to the site at about 2:30 in the afternoon local time and talked with everyone about antenna locations and what bands everyone would start out on…as I failed to bring my band pass filters I bought JUST FOR THESE EVENTS…uggg. Anyway, once it was all settled, I strung up my 20m wire antenna into a tree as a vertical and ran out both radials for the IC705 and tuner setup on the bedcover of the truck. See photo above, as it is the only one I have.

Here we have the MFJ-496 in use and making a contact for Winter Field Day.

I also brought out a relic from the 80’s that Roger KG4WBI gave me a while back, an MFJ-496 CW Keyboard. These are as rare as hen’s teeth these days and information is even more scarce. I was fortunate and finally found the manual for it online and was able to download and print it, so I have a physical copy now. It is almost cheating when it comes to sending code as you only have to be able to type. You can program a series of memories for contesting and that is what it appears to be designed for. It will also do RTTY as well but I have not dabbled into that realm yet to see how to do it. If you are into CW and like things such as vintage HAM radio gear, this is a must have for your collection.

Here is the person (Josh KN4RTY), responsible for most of the photos, working with his daughter on making some contacts. They had a great time and I really appreciate him letting me plug into his antenna later in the evening!

Thank you Josh!

Above we have Josh’s little girl and Roger KG4WBI working SSB on an unknown machine while I was gone. Roger also stayed all night while I slept peacefully in my warm bed at home…lol. He did tell me later that he got on the air in the early morning hours and had a great run of contacts while most everyone else was asleep. I would like to point out that he is always really well prepared for this type of event and usually has enough equipment to put up a site all by himself, with multiple rigs mind you, and this is the spirit of these events. He and I also have a Ten Tec addiction as well and have plans to bring some older rigs back to life in the not too distant future. (Can we say “Tritons” anyone?) That will be epic!

One of the things I like about these events that is different from me working POTA is that it has a different theory of operation, it is to see if you can setup an emergency radio station similar to a POTA activation in that it is remote and usually battery powered. The similarities end there though. The difference is that these are not nice, serene and quiet locations, there are other radios, in close proximity, and people chatting in the background and stuff moving around, basically there is a lot of noise everywhere. It simulates the chaos of an actual emergency a little more to me with our group. We don’t setup huge contest operations, nor do we have a mobile command station (trailer) that is ready to deploy. We have a bunch of guys with radios and who are willing to help. We also know that we are still learning and we don’t criticize each other and just simply want to see if we can make a go of it. So unlike a POTA activation where I am basically all in while I am activating, here we will stop and chat about the setup or discuss the food we are bringing or what have you. It is not all about the contacts for us but more about the community.

Now on to the logging issues I ran into. Please be aware these are squarely my fault entirely as I did basically zero research before deploying to the site. So the following is on me.

I started out using the regular field day rules for our site…this was my first mistake. I used 5A for our designator and this caused a lot of problems as people kept asking for this again and again because of my error. I finally figured it out when I heard a SSB exchange and then noted the correct one on the log as you can see in the below photo. The second thing I did wrong was I used POTA rules for logging. Mainly the fact that I only captured the band and not the actual frequency. This is why I need to read the actual rules before deploying out to the site to operate for hours to come away with contacts that I cant submit. If you will notice on the second page I started noting the frequency as well…way later.

All in all, it was still a great event and we all had a wonderful time. If you want more information about field day go to the ARRL website here. Next year I will be better prepared and not make sure rookie mistakes as this…hopefully. LOL. 73 Yall.

Monte Sano State Park POTA Activation AAR with a 20m Hamstick

Well, I finally activated a park in a new state… Alabama. You might think this is normal, till you google my address and see that I live on the Alabama state line in Georgia! I am literally two minutes by car from the state line and it took me several months to activate a park in Alabama… Anyway, I decided to activate the [sarcasm]remote and rarely visited[/sarcasm] Monte Sano State Park K-1048!!! Woohoo! Well. it is neither rare nor remote actually being literally minutes outside of Huntsville AL. It was new for me so I packed up the TR-35 and the new 20m Hamstick setup and struck out for Huntsville.

As fate would have it, I had business meetings that were on a time table so I didnt have a long time to stay, I thought once again that if I get my ten contacts I will be happy, well…I got more.

This is the QSO map from this trip. The VERY FIRST contact was with France!!! I thought, this is going to be a good day. Any day that my 5 watts reaches across the Atlantic Ocean, is a good day for me. It is obvious that the band and take off angle of my antenna dictate a certain “minimum” distance that people can hear me. A quick look at the map shows this, but just outside of this region and all bets are off! They piled in and in just over an hour I had 43 contacts in the log, with one being a dupe… It never ceases to amaze me at how well these little radios can perform with some thought and patience, but today the whole patience thing was out the window!!! I just kept getting calls! It was a QRP dream activation, I just wished I had been able to stay longer to see how many more I could have worked… Seems here lately, I am only able to stay and hour or two at best, I hope to remedy this soon, but for now, I will take that!!!

I also worked CU3AA in the Azores and VE2WLD (who also performed double duty as a Park to Park as well) for three DX stations on this trip alone! That is awesome and makes the whole activation just that much more special to me. If you have not ever tried POTA, I would recommend it at least once, it might not be for you, but if you enjoy setting up for field day, then you will probably like this. It is similar, but much more relaxed and lower key… At least that is how I see it. I find myself getting on the air more as a hunter and as an activation now that I have activated. It is just plain fun to go to a park and operated with a battery for a while and answer the passerby question from time to time. Once again, you can see the band opening and closing like waves on the ocean (maybe more like the tide coming in as it is slower than waves breaking on the beach) in the signal reports in the log. I even had a couple of people tell me they had problems with QSB (fading of the signal) towards the end of the activation.

Also of note is that this park has a day use fee (see below), be prepared for it when you get there, they have an attendant at the entrance to collect this fee before you enter the park. Parks seem to have a lot of lattitube in how they collect these fees, I have seen honor system pay boxes as well as no fees at all (Booker T Washington in Chattanooga TN has no fee) and then places like Monte Sano where they collect the fee at the entrance to the park. Cloudland has the honor system boxes as well as a attendant that works at the entrance part time, so you might find a person at the entrance and you might not, it is kind of a crap shoot with this one. You just never know… What I do know is the fee structure is normally really reasonable and to be honest…cheap for what you get. I bought my Georgia park pass back after my first activation and now that I am 47 activations in, that cost average is almost down to 1$ per visit. Once I break 50 it will be less than 1$ per trip. That is a smokin deal if you will be doing POTA ops regulaly at your local state parks (and they offer an annual pass like this one in Georgia). I plan to get over 100 activations at Cloudland before I have to renew my pass next May so then the daily cost should hit 50 cents per visit. Where else can you get a deal that good?

This is the only thing I brought back from that trip aside from my logbook, I don’t know how I forgot to get photos of the setup for you guys…I straight dropped the ball on that one. I guess it means I get to go back at some point so I can properly photograph it. LOL

The Penntek TR-35 is really starting to grow on me. This little radio just plain works. It doesn’t have things like a waterfall display or QSO recording like my IC-705 but what is does have is pretty much CW perfection. I have every control I normally use when doing an activation, at my fingertips and not buried in a sub menu or an alternate function for commonly used features…like CW speed control is a dedicated knob, this is super handy as POTA hunters vary in speed a good bit so being able to slow down on the fly for a slower op and then speed back up for a faster one is really handy. It is being tested out for a potential trip to Central America in a few months so I hope to keep up on using it and to prove it out as a capable machine while I am south of the border.

All in all it was a great trip and I finally got to activate Alabama too! If you have not used CW and want to, there are lots of ways to learn this historical mode fairly easily. It isn’t for everyone, just like SSTV isn’t for everyone, so if you don’t like CW it is all good, that is why we have different modes, at least in my mind it is, lol. If you have not done it yet, please like this blog and subscribe for future posts, Till next time, get your radio out and make some contacts!

Some days are better than expected in spite of band conditions.

Well today the work was grueling and about 3PM, the wife gave me clearance to go do an activation over at K-2169 Cloudland Canyon State Park. So come 4PM I grabbed the log book out of the house and jumped into the truck for a quick activation.

Upon arrival, I was all by myself in the upper parking lot. Wonderful as I can choose any spot I want to keep the sun out of my eyes and back the truck up next to the grass for my counter poise wires. So I deploy the “truck-tenna” as quickly as I can and get in the cab to plug in the TR-35. I got the cab nice and warm with the heater while setting up the antenna and then shut down the truck to keep the noise to a minimum while I activate. I really like my “trick” of having a quiet and warm winter time location for POTA. So for the winter this is how I will roll… lol literally.

The solar data says it wont be a great day for POTA…

So once I got setup, I dialed around on 20 meters a little to scope out the band conditions a little before I started, but it was opened up pretty strong when I dialed through the band. So I went up to the QRP area and found a nice quiet spot, listened for a few minutes while I wrote up my logbook with the usual data for my activation and then made a fatal mistake…I sent a CQ from the keyer memory while I started to log into the POTA website so I could spot myself, but before I could get it open on my iPhone I got an answer! So things are hopping now! LOL I log him then immediately get another call, and this went on for a couple of minutes. So I finally get a chance to spot myself so I can be found on the bands…. waa waa waaaaaa… (The joke is on me here, as I think I could have easily gotten the activation by just calling cq today as good as things were going) But once the spot went up, Dear Lord the gates were opened up! I had a mini-pile up the rest of the time I was able to operate, I literally cleared the pile 1 hour later and went QRT so I could go home.

You can tell if I am in a hurry or not by how I write the time next to the QSO, if I have time, I will write the proper time signature, if not then it is just enough data to log it for me.

Some things I took away from this activation are that a 20m hamstick is not able to hear inside about 500 miles, give or take… Just take a look at the map and it is painfully obvious. But yeah, it works WONDERFULLY outside of that zone! My best QSO tonight was to Oregon with WA7RAR using 5 watts at 2064 miles, not quite the 1000 miles per watt that people want, but it was still a good QSO for me! I still have not bought the other hamsticks yet, I am going to be ordering them soon though so we can play with different bands too.

I did have a few minutes where a spammer tried to shut me down, I didn’t even catch it until I copied the call twice and realized they were just pulling my chain sending random letters with just dits… Then they moved on and I went back to filling up the logbook. Also of note is that I learned TODAY that I could add the “stroke” and special designator in HAMRS and it would take it without killing the call sign! I entered my first mobile contact in my log today. I have logged a couple in the past but didn’t know I could enter the mobile designator in HAMRS… Sorry about that to the few ops that I have not given that info to on my logs.

So for future reference, don’t let the solar data tell you that you cant make a contact when things look bad online. Just give it a shot and throw out a CQ and see what happens. So until next time, just get on the air and have some fun!

72

WK4DS

David

A good day in the field for QRP CW...

This after action report is brought to you by yours truly as I have no sponsors at this time. HiHi Anyway, I went to the local state park for an evening activation and didn’t know what I was in for.

I setup the TR-35 with the “Trucktenna” (I think I will just start calling it that. LoL) and got on the air, but today I thought I would back the power down a little to about 4.5 watts to see if anyone would notice. That is a 10% reduction from my usual output power. Well the QSO speaks for itself.

Seems if the band is open, it really doesnt matter how little power you have, you will have a great time. I am about to build one of the little qrp power meter kits from here:

QRP Watt Meter

This way I can accurately set the output power prior to starting a activation and I will know how much it is for sure.

I made 80 QSOs and off I had more time, I think I could have made 100! The TR-35 is turning out to be a great little radio that I enjoy using. Even though it doesn’t do all the stuff that the other radios can do, it just works REALLY well. I can highly recommend it.

I also made up a power cord for my radios when inside the truck since they are all QRP and don’t pull much more than 1 amp max. The power port in my truck is rated for way more than that, so it is good to go. It would be interesting to know just how long those two huge lead acid batteries under the hood would last worth the TR-35…lol

Huntsville Hamfest 2022 AAR

So it has come and went again, the Huntsville Hamfest was alive and well this year with a strong showing from major companies as well as a sizeable boneyard! Who doesn’t like a good boneyard?!?

We started our morning by grabbing some coffee in Scottsboro on our way from Trenton and heading over to Huntsville. Since we had paid online we did not have to buy our tickets at the gate and we were able to immediately register, get a pin and go on into the Hamfest. I have to admit, I was a little bit taken aback when we got into the show iteself by seeing all of the vendors that were there. There were so many vendors in new equipment, product manufacturers and the boneyard was unbelievable. It was like I had went back in time 20 years to a hamfest. I have always been more interested in the boneyard than I have in new equipment so we focused most of our time wondering the boneyard looking at things from days gone by and occasionally buying stuff.

This was the second trip to the truck of the day… lol

We bought so much stuff that we had to go get a little red wagon cart out of the truck to haul it all back with. I finally bought an amplifier and a power supply to drive it, as well as a few antenna tuners and some other little odds and ends, OH YEAH! and a 20 meter hamstick for my POTA ops to reduce the kit size if possible on some outings. I don’t even remember what Roger bought other than the STACK of those green hard shell cases from GigaParts! Lol, I think he ended up with 4 of them before he was done! HaHa. He has so many portable radios that he wants to kit out and these are almost perfect right out of the chute. a little work and some closed cell foam and mine will house my Argonaut and all the associated stuff to use it for an activation.

We saw so much cool stuff that it is hard to remember it all. Things like vacuum tubes galore, along with all the panel meters ever made at one table, and if you look close enough, you can even find vintage crystals in a cigar box here and there.

It was a kit builder’s paradise! We found so many parts to build amps and tuners with and there was a table with nothing but little project kits (I failed to get a photo of that though…) .

We grabbed some lightening arrestors as you can never have too many of those… then started looking for cool old Ten Tec stuff. I was actually looking for two very specific things made by Ten Tec back in the day. One was a Hercules II amplifier and the other was the Collins mechanical filters for my Omni 7 radio. If you happen to read this and know where I can at least get the 500hz Collins filter I would really appreciate it.

Here are some of the Ten Tec rigs we found, minus the Pegasus and the Scout that I forgot to grab a photos of…

The mighty Orion 2 contesting rig even made an appearance!

Something else we noticed early on was the incredible number of Ameritron AL-811 amplifiers that was there! It seemed like every other table had one on it. That is an exaggeration of course, but it did seem like every time we looked up we saw another one. We saw so many that it actually became a little running joke between me and Roger.

About 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized we needed sustenance and grabbed some nutritious options from the snack bar onsite. As an aside, I have realized that I am now officially vegetarian too. At some point I figured out that I am allergic to beef (probably the result of a tick bite), so I decided to join my daughter, who is vegetarian due to medical issues arising from PANDAS, in being vegetarian as well. Something you need to understand here, I hate vegetables. Yeah, I said it. I cant stand vegetable soup or okra or butter beans, just cant stand most vegetables, but I am figuring it out…ever so slowly.

I don’t know what the big deal is with the whole division in the dietary community too, I just don’t order meat and mind my own business…simple. But you see these vegetarians throwing fits over restaurants not offering things compatible with their diets and meat-a-tarians making fun of the herbivores. I just dont get it, but who knows (obviously not me). I just know that if I don’t eat beef, I don’t wake up in the middle of the night with hives head to toe and itching all over for an hour.

Anyway, I got the fries and pretzel and they were quite delicious. Yes, the pretzel has butter on it and it was awesome! (I am not vegan…lol)

Once fueled up, it was back into the fray. Here are a few photos of some of the highlights I saw…

These keys were amazing! If you want a wonderful key built by a ham, this would be one that I would suggest, they were simply subline.

I even found the youtubers. Lol.

At the end of the day, we finally called it a done deal and headed home with our new treasures. All in all it was a great show and if you are within reasonable driving distance, I would say to give it a shot next year, it was well worth our trip this year to say the least. Thanks for following along and I hope you enjoyed the tour!

72

David - WK4DS