1 POTA, 2 Radios, 3 Modes and 4 Bands!

Today was a fun day…

The location is all too familiar, but I set out to do a sort of special operation today. I wanted to complete a POTA activation using two radios, 3 modes and 4 bands in one sitting. This doesn’t sound like a tall order but since I am operating inside the truck cab, this does involve a little logistics to not just have stuff piled everywhere while I am operating. As you will see in the photos below, I still ran into this problem somewhat, but it was manageable.

I setup at the disc golf parking lot again, but this time there were quite a few people there and some of them actually quizzed me about what I was doing. One gentleman, Jerry as noted in my log, actually chatted for a good bit about how he has been looking to get into ham radio but the Atlanta area is kinda tough on locating local hams for some reason. I gave him a card and told him to email me and I would give him as much info on it as I could find to get him on the right path…

As you can see in the photos, I set up ham sticks and this time I started on 40 meters FT8. I wanted to get the FT8 portion of my “sprint” if sorts out of the way first as the other two modes were going to be on the Ten Tec Scout 555. I had recently activated with it and it was acting up with chirping on CW and reports of RF noise on my audio on SSB. I attributed this to poor connection of the 20 meter band module as it was fine on 15 meters. Armed with this knowledge, before I left out for the park, I took the radio to the shop and use the Deoxit for gold contacts and a tooth brush to clean the contacts on the band modules. I even wetted one module pretty good and used it to “clean the contacts in the radio by plugging and unplgging the module a bunch of times.

This improvised procedure worked as I got good reports and the CW ran flawlessly as you will see later. Deoxit is magical stuff, if you dont have any, it is work your investment to grab a small can of it.

I really enjoy using this radio for my FT8 operating and with the upgraded finals and RF deck, it runs flawlessly now with SWRs in the 2:1 and even slightly higher range without problem. Today saw SWR levels on transmit of about 1.7:1 and it happily skipped right along making several contacts in a row at one point.

After completing 6 QSOs on FT8 I figured it was time to get the Ten Tec Scout 555 out of the case and see what I could scare up on CW.

The 40m Ham stick that I have must have a really high Q as it is very narrow banded. So I have it tuned for the CW portion of the band and the SWR in the SSB area can be quite bad at times. For this reason, I chose not to hunt any SSB contacts on 40 meters today. Once on CW (this was about 1/2 hour later as this is when I talked to Jerry) the band must have been closing or the band noise was getting so bad that I could not hear many stations. I was able to work Alabama and Tennessee before the call signs faded into the noise. That is something you will learn pretty quick about HF radio propagation, if you want to work closer in stations, use the lower bands, but if you want to reach the west coast from Georgia on a ham stick, use the higher bands like 15 and 20 meters. When 10 meters is open I have worked other continents with ease… Don’t discount those higher bands, they are truly magical.

In the above photo I have the CW key and keyer staged but not connected. The mouse is actually driving the FT8 machine and makes working FT8 so much easier to be honest.

In these two photos you can see what you have to work on constantly. The above photo shows the cable that came with my Ten Tec Scout 555 when I bought it. This is a common issue you will find with home shop made cables. These were stripped back way too far and as I used the cable, the conductors started breaking and I was beginning to worry about blowing fuses.

I happen to own a tool that is designed to remove these pins from the connector, so I am able to dismantle this connector properly. I dismantled it, then took it apart and cleaned it up, properly stripped and re-soldered the pins, then put heat shrink tubing on it all to insulated and protect it better. Now I am not so worried about it either shorting and melting the wire or blowing the fuses and shutting down the activation over something as simple as a cable…

Once I finished on 40 meters and had two modes in the bag on one band, I switched over to 15 meters CW to see what was happening there. There was a contest going on so it was a little crowded and I didn’t understand the exchange so I didn’t jump into the contest, but rather setup on a clear spot and calledCQ and worked a couple of stations there, one station of which is DX!!!

At this point. I got a phone call from KG4WBI about a completely unrelated matter, which we discussed and I told him to fire up his HF rig and we would see if ground wave would make the trip to his house from the park so I could get Georgia in the log as well as a 2nd mode on 15 meters! Well, it worked just fine and we had a great QSO on 15 meters SSB before he had to sign off and go run errands. So having confidence that SSB was going to work better I started calling CQ on SSB.

I got literally zero replies to my calls… so I went hunting instead. I found two more ops that could hear me and I was able to bag a couple more QSOs and these were Park to Park contacts to boot!

These three photo show me installing the band module into the Ten Tec Scout 555 transceiver. It really is that simple to change bands on this radio. Now to be fair, this is not as simple as just turning a knob, but it really isn’t that bad.

To remove the module you pull out the bottom of the little lever on the front of the module and it will pop out enough to be able to slip it out, then you grab a different one off of the pile and stick it back in the slot in the radio. Push it to seat it and then your ready to go.

At this point, I switched over to 20 meters and since the PTO (notice it is not a VFO) was still up in the SSB area, I decided to see if I could hunt some contacts with that mode. I landed one contact in SSB on 20 meters and was happy to get them in the log.

After working the one lonely SSB contact on 20 meters, I decided to give CW a try as well… Remember me mentioning a contest? Well, it was here too. It was going strong as well and because of this I was only able to work one contact on CW as well. If nothing else it netted me another band!

My last stop of the day was 17 meters. The 17 meter band is a WARC band and therefore it is off limits to contesting. Now, to be fair, POTA has been called contesting of sorts, but as of right now it is not considered a contest but is more in the spirit of something similar to a rare DX station activating on the same band and developing a huge pileup there. So I proceeded to hunt me an empty spot (18.078mhz) and started calling CQ.

This is when things literally took off! I netted a whole page of contacts in about a 1/2 hour span of time! What a day! 4th band in the books and I was stoked!!! 17 meters must have been where all the POTA ops had went due to the contest and I didn’t get the memo…lol. The Scout worked flawlessly after the cleaning and I cant be happier now with the old girl.

One of the great things about 17 meters is the propagation is really anybodys call. I worked Hungary at one point as well as California, Alaska and Idaho, then there is a ton of east coast stations too, it was everywhere today on 17 meters. Ham radio is so cool…

Before closing today I wanted to mention that Aaron KV9L and I have a youtube channel and we just hit 2000 subscribers (as of this writing)! If you are into ham radio and watching videos about it, then we would love for you to come over! I am currently doing a series of short form videos that are teaching CW one letter per day. There is no limit to the number ofd times you can watch them so I am hoping these become long term training aids for people.

Once I get the letters, numbers and punctuation done, I am going to start doing words next. After words will come sentences so we will see how it goes. Anyway, I just wanted to thank the 2000 people that made us as successful as we are!

73

David -WK4DS

POTA, HF Signals & Ten Tec

Today got so fast paced that I forgot how to do CW properly! Let me explain…

As you can see from the QSO map above, the bands were alive and well on this day from Raccoon Creek WMA (US-9875). The calls just kept coming in and I finally had to got QRT, with people still calling, and pack up as I had to meet the wife for a dinner date! I normally clear the little pile up I will draw in and then I can simply power down. I really felt bad about having to shut down with stations still calling me. I now know what those rare DX station feel like… It is surreal to experience that to be honest… especially from Alabama.

You see, today I activated US-9875 Raccoon Creek WMA and I went at a different time of day. I wanted to spend several hours here today as I dont get over to the area often and I wanted to try to get as many contacts as I could in the afternoon. My goal was 60 QSOs today which is way more than I usually worry about, but like I said, this park is a solid 40 minutes in one direction and I dont go this way too often so I wanted to “make it count” if you know what i mean.

I rolled into the WMA at about 14:30 local time and set out to build the radio down by the Tennessee river. This is a small parking lot at the end of one of the gravel roads into the WMA and a lot of locals come to this spot to fish in the river from the shore. Did I mention it started raining right after I got the antenna setup and I got into the truck? Well, let me tell you, the rain set in and it didnt stop the whole time. I even broke down the antenna and stuff out in the rain today!!!

The above photo shows what the station looks like right before I plug all that stuff in and turn the power on. Everything I need to get on the air is in that pile for both SSB as well as CW. To be fair, I can get by without the Picokeyer and the 1/8 mono to 1/8 mono cable and I could simple plug the paddle right into the radio and it would work just fine. So there is really excess here above what is absolutely needed.

I did get the nanoVNA out and look at the antenna to make sure the rain didn’t do something to it like push it out of band due to the conductivity of the wet earth or what ever. Turns out it was just fine… It was a little low with the water on everything but the null was really close to the bottom of the 15 meter band edge so I used it and didnt worry about it. If you will notice, it was only 1.233:1 SWR at the band edge so it was plenty happy and we never checked it again after this on 15 meters. When I switched to 20 meters, the SWR had moved up to about 1.8:1 or maybe it was at 2:1 but I ran it and as you can see in the log, that didn’t seem to matter at all.

I setup shop on 15 meters SSB for a change and wanted to see what I could get before 15 faded out, but I noticed almost immediately that the ALC light wasn’t coming on at all when I would transmit audio. This lamp should just blink on the energy peaks but it wasn’t coming on at all. I messed with the mic gain and nothing. I did notice that I could wiggle the cord at the plug and it would make all sorts of stuff happen. This pointed me to the connector being faulty somehow but workable to some degree.

I made a few contacts with it like this and basically yelling at the radio would barely get the ALC to illuminate. I asked the last person for a report and they told me the audio was muffled and weak. Armed with all this knowledge, I decided to open the connector and see if a wire was broken. Well, they were not broken…but they were also not connected either. There were two cold solder joints from the factory…figures. I got a pretty decent photo of the green wire in the below photo. Well…that shuts down the SSB portion of this activation so onto 15 meters CW!

The 15 meter band has two things that make it unique. It is quieter than the lower bands for me and the “skip distance” is MUCH further with mobile, or improvised antennas. I didn’t make many CW contacts on 15 but check out the locations! Washington state is pretty common for me on 15 meters, in fact the entirety of the western United States is easier for me to work on 15 meters during the day. But a lot of people apparently don’t know this so lots of times the band will be open but there wont be anyone on it. Case in point today, I worked 4 ops in 11 minutes of calling CQ.

After vacuuming the bands of CW ops, I moved to FT8 to see what was happening and this is my “yardstick” of how open the band is. Turns out it was REALLY open! 15 meters FT8 netted a nice dozen contacts and got me almost half way to my original goal of 60 QSOs! This didn’t take long either and just goes to show that the higher bands are great if you will just go check them.

I had switched radios to use the sBitx V4 (I did the software upgrade and got some new features like the color coding of FT8 information you see below) You can also see that I was transmitting with 17 watts too. This is not precise, but it is close and I use it for my logbook notes.

After finishing on 15 meters I moved down to 20 meters to finish out the day. The sun was starting to set at this point and I knew 20 meters would serve me better at this point. after hunting W9XT, I set up shop on a clear frequency and started calling CQ, this is when things got a little crazy. I had a nice little pileup form pretty quick that took me about half an hour to clear, then nothing… It must be band fading at this point as the stations just vanished. I figured I would switch over to FT8 for a few minutes at this point too and see what I could get in that mode. I didn’t mention that I used the sBitx for CW at this point and to be honest, I dont think I will use it for CW seriously till there is a software change to make it work better. If you try to use it much past 18WPM it is like it fights you and induces mistakes for some reason. The people smarter than me in the email reflector seem to think is has to do with how the software scans the inputs on the radio, but I do know it will induce mistakes in your sending if you are not very attentive and send a very specific way. It will work if your careful and go about 18WPM max. I can use a keyboard to send CW but that really isnt all that much fun to be honest.

I struggled with FT8 today on 20 meters for some reason. The QSO could not complete to the 73 so it would not autolog the QSO. It would also not finish the exchange many times either. I could get it to send the signal report then they would send back and they would just get stuck in that step and never move past it. It got really frustrating towards the end, but I did manage to net some contacts here too.

At this point I had made 48 contacts which is a phenomenal day out for me, but I wanted 12 more to have that 60 that I started out my goal with! So at this point I move back down into the CW portion but this time on the Ten Tec Scout 555 instead since the CW mode on it works beautifully.

It took me a couple minutes to switch the radios out and to find a clear frequency and get started, but once I did, it didn’t take long to get a HUGE PILE UP going!!!! I got so excited during this part that I was racing the clock to see how many I could work before having to shut down the radio and go home as I was almost out of time. I started rushing the closing and it was here that I got sloppy with my CW. You see, I normally use QRP power levels for the most part, just the sBitx and the Ten Tec Scout are QRO by the rules and the sBitx is borderline to me. I will usually turn the power down to 5 watts or so anyway to preserve the finals in the radio but today I had the Scout and it is set at 50 watts and is not easily field adjusted from that power level.

As the pile up raged on, I got so lost in the process that I started sending 72 intermingled with contacts getting 73 instead and finally someone stopped me and asked why I am signing both modes and this is when it hit me. I had been running on autopilot about half the time just logging contacts and the muscle memory would just send the 72 and I would not even think about it. I would then called QRZ and get another call, rinse and repeat… Here is the next problem for me. My ragchew copy and my POTA copy are very different levels. He sent me the message at the speed I was working POTA contacts. Your brain will learn how to copy the formatted style exchanges without even thinking about it. I know that I am going to get a two letter state after the signal report and I can copy callsigns really well for some reason up to about 25 WPM, but send me a full sentence question and it breaks my brain. I cant copy half of it without writing it down. I can ragchew comfortably at 18 WPM max at this time, but if you ask me a question about my radio or something that isn’t part of the usual banter in a POTA contact and I am lost… I apologized for this mistake I had been making for probably 20 minutes without even realizing it and it was really close to when I had to leave anyway so I went ahead and called QRT to get the radio put away as it was raining really well at this point too…

To everyone that reads this that I didn’t get to work on this day, I am sorry to have to had shut down the rig and leave, I was having a wonderful time and wanted to stay longer!!!

The moral of this part of the story is dont get in such a hurry that you cause confusion with the hunters, take your time and be sure in what you are actually sending out over the airwaves.

On a brighter note, I got my 60! and 14 more!!! I dont know how long it has been since I got that many calls in the log in one day. Until next time I hope to work you on the air!

73

WK4DS - David

A simple POTA activation

Today saw me use the Ten Tec Scout again to great effect. Below is the case I carry it in showing the full compliment of band modules (I keep one in the radio and today that is the 20 meter module). Under the radio is the power cable in a pocket just for it and next is the spot for the microphone in a more permanent role. You can see the impression from where it sits in the case currently.

These hard cases come from Harbor Freight and make wonderful travel cases for my POTA radios to be quite honest about it. I need to get two more and kit out my Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and my Penntek TR-35 and the set will be complete. The Argonaut has a nice hard case, but it is really large and kinda hard to maneuver with. I thought it would be a great kit for POTA and it does work, but I would really like something different… As an aside, I store the owners manual to each radio behind the lid foam on all of these. That way I have a instruction book should I forget how to do something obscure that I dont use all that often.

I have not dismantled a band module to see what all is inside it but there is a good bit of stuff going on in each one. They are about 3” long and the circuit board goes all the way to the front. So there is plenty of widgets inside them to make the magic happen.

Today, I only used the 15 and 20 meter modules as I was being a little lazy and only put out radials for these two ham sticks. A quick SWR check with the nanoVNA and I was off to the races.

The above shows my CW key and keyer. The key is made by N3ZN and if you have not tried one then I highly recommend them. It works beautifully for me. The keyer is a Picokeyer from Hamgadgets.com and works way better than it should for what it costs. Since Ten Tec radios traditionally dont have memories for the CW keyers, this is the way to have those memories really easily.

The next thing I did that was out of my usual character is to get the hand mic out and work some SSB today as well. It worked OK, but there were times when the audio was odd and I would get little hints to something being wrong but all in all it worked fine.

As per my usual outings, I had the place to myself today with only a couple of cars rolling by during the entirety of my activation. I like it like this though as there is no ignition noise to deal with or inverters making RF hash, just the peace and quiet of the park and my radio chattering in the truck. During this time of day, the sun will beam into my door if I roll down the window beside me so I usually just roll down the other three and the one beside me just a little so the air still moves through the truck taking away the heat from the radio and making it nice and pleasant.

Just look at that parking lot all for me! HaHa! That never gets old! There is just something magical about the peace and quiet of a park like this.

Something I learned today that is different between the Argonaut 5 and the Scout is that I have to use the key jack to make this radio transmit a side tone in CW. I can key the transmitter with the “mic jack cable” that I made for the Argonaut 5 but it wont produce a side tone with the Scout for some reason. So I instead used this port on the back of the radio to get it to work right (see photo below). Another special thing about this radio to me is that it has a Curtis keyer chip in it and you can plug a set of paddles directly into it and it will work as you would expect, but it is in a different port… Go figure. All these options are hot all the time too. Plug a straight key into it and key it to send CW then you could (theoretically) just pick up the microphone and talk to someone on SSB without changing anything else on the radio. It appears that it is in SSB mode all the time and CW is just the side tone being transmitted instead of the audio from the microphone. This does cause one little issue that a user will notice pretty quickly. The zero beat is the display frequency plus or minus (depending on band) the side tone frequency. The filter is simply a bandpass knob that adjust the filter bandwidth and that is it. A very simple radio that just works.

An example of the side tone offset in CW can been seen in the photo above where I am tuned up on 15 meters. It displays 21.0523mhz but the radio is actually operating on 21.053mhz when transmitting. So if you are near the band edges on say 40 meters CW, just keep this in mind so you are not transmitting out of band. The owners manual even mentions this to make sure you stay compliant with FCC regulations.

As you can see from the log above, I started out on 15 meters CW and worked several stations there before moving to 15 meters SSB till the band essentially faded out. At that point I decided to see what would happen if I went down to 20 meters SSB and called CQ… Well the log speaks for itself. I made 26 contacts in 15 minutes! This has to be some sort of world record!!! LOL…for me that is… It was wild how big the pile up was and how quick it happened! The people were super nice and courteous and really helpful so I thank all of you that called me this day and I really appreciate you stopping by to say hello!

73

WK4DS - David

Getting back to my roots…with CW

Today I activated park US-2169 with the Ten Tec Scout and only used CW.

This was a pleasant change from the FT8 I have been using so much recently. I was actually planning on switching to SSB then FT8 as well and use all three modes in one sitting…but…CW was working SOOOOOO well.

I also decided to setup at the picnic table by the canyon rim so I could use a 41’ wire antenna and a tuner. This allowed me to go up to 10 meters as I checked the spot page and a bunch of people was already there. I worked on getting the antenna tuned a while, only to find that I had used it wrong. Once I figured this out, I was able to get it to tune to about 1.5:1 and this is perfectly fine for a Ten Tec.

I was blown away by what happened next.

Here is what I took with me today… all those cases have different radios in them. The orange case is the sBitx (my goto FT8 rig in the field) the green case is the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and the tan case is the Ten Tec Scout. I was loaded for bear. Lol. I was going to use the Scout for CW and SSB and then switch to the sBitx for FT8. Then why did I bring the Argonaut 5 out? Because the keyer and paddle are in that case that I wanted to use. HaHa. I also used the tuner and some cabling out of that kit as well.

Let’s talk about the Scout for a minute. This is a unique radio in that to change bands you change these modules that plug into the front of the radio. I have the whole set of band modules for my Scout and keep them in the hard case with the radio. It is an interesting little radio that also has a unique tuning device. The radio has a PTO instead of a VFO. So the knob has a distinctive resistance when you turn it as it is a mechanical screw driving a core into an inductor. This also means it remembers the frequency you are on without the need for a memory battery.

I kept the nanoVNA on the table for tuning when switching bands and I elevated the tuner on a pair of lineman pliers to make tuning a little easier. My Scout is unmodified from original and works really well. It does have some quirks but nothing that is a deal breaker.

The station as operated today. I like this spot as it is also in the public view and can sometimes spark conversations with passerbys. I had a conversation with a man and his wife on this day and he was in the signal corps in Korea and was copying the code as they walked by. He waxed nostalgic for a few minutes and we had a wonderful conversation and then they were gone…

The below photo shows the tree where I strung my antenna up to and you can see the table in the background it went down to. I like to string up a huge 65’ wire most of the time but today I just used my 41’ random wire since it was already in the kit.

These new LiFePO3 batteries are truly amazing to me. They weigh almost nothing and I operated for two straight hours at 50 watts and the battery was still at 13.26VDC. This blows my mind. I can pick this battery up with two fingers! I also ran it through my fuse distribution block so everything was fused.

This log shows how awesome the band was on this day. I started on 10 meters CW as I was listening around and the first call I copied was England! That was when I knew it was going to be good. I didn’t get him, but shortly after I started calling CQ and 6 out of the next 10 contacts were DX!!! The first one was Chile and I am pretty sure that is the first Chilean I have ever worked.

After that I noticed the rest were from the European area of the world which is still awesome! The other domestic callsigns were still very far away and I was stoked to mess with other bands as well to see what I could hear. After these initial 10 QSOs, I found that the band was fading so I figured I had hopped on the air at just the right time and caught a wave. At this realisation, I figured I would give 17 meters a try and see what happens. It was much more difficult for some reason, not much activity at all… I guess everyone was up on 10 meters… haha.

So after that, I figured I would just test 15 meters before calling it quits for the day. Well, I must have hit a band opening on 15 meters as well. The calls started coming in and as you can see below I got South Africa! That is also a first for me!!! I normally cant hear Africa since I use less than ideal antennas. I had a blast on 15 meters and the logbook reflects that. I even worked two “regulars” that I know by name but have never met in person! KJ7DT - Paul in Idaho and K9IS (who I have written about before) - Steven in Wisconsin. Both of these men have worked me well over 50 times and I am pretty sure Paul is over 100!

It is really cool to get “Z” calls in the log though as I rarely hear this call letter on the air. I always think it is way off, and sometimes it is, like the South African station but then I get one and it next door in the Caymen Islands too…lol.

This was an awesome day and I am glad you followed along in the story with me. Until next time, I hope to work you on the air!

WK4DS - David

73

Jumping on 40 meters right quick…

Today saw me testing a theory, that 40 meters wasn’t closed just because it was late in the morning…

When I got to US-2169 today, I wanted to get on the air quickly, so I decided that I would activate the Sitton Gulch parking lot instead of going to the top of the mountain. This one thing adds about 40 minutes to my operating time as it takes me about 20 more minutes to drive to the top of the mountain from here and then there is the drive back down. Armed with this extra time, I decided to also add a long radial so 40 meters would tune up to a usable SWR. I was able to get the SWR on 40 meters CW down to about 1.6:1 and this is what I made all my 40 meter contacts at. The beauty of Ten Tec radios is their notoriously robust transmitters and the legend that they can survive transmitting into 10:1 SWR without ill effects. I have personally used my Argonaut 5 in 2.5:1 conditions and had no problems at all.

Today I thought I would just jump on 40 meters for a minute and see what I could scare up on CW then move over to FT8 before heading up to 20 meters. I was not ready for the pile up that happened next… It was interesting as there really wasn’t much activity on 40 meters at the time when I hopped on. It was almost lunch time at this point (late morning) and the noise on the band was picking up. I sent out my CQ a few times and it didn’t take long to get an answer. I also spotted myself on the app too and I am certain this helped immensely as well.

I worked over 10 contacts in about as many minutes and was stoked to have bagged the activation so easily. I switched over to FT8 now that I have cleared my little pileup on CW and see what I can find there!

I simply added a couple more radials to the antenna to help with SWR so that I could operate on 40 meters today. One of these radials was over 30 feet long! The 40 meter ham stick that I have is not that great of an antenna from what I have seen. The SWR is really touchy with it and I can not get it to tune without several large radials helping it. I dont know what I am doing wrong with it, but I really need to figure it out as the 40 meter band is a lot of fun!

The measurment kit below has becoume part of my permenant truck POTA kit that I take with me everywhere. It has the nanoVNA and all the associated widgets for it as well as a simple little multi-meter to check things with out in the field. This has been very valuable at times and a I recommend everyone carry a simple meter with them.

Here is a simple little hack that I found with my Ten Tec Argonaut 5 radio that I though was cool. You can make up a front (mic plug) connector for the keyer cable instead of using the tiny one on the back if you will simply wire the keyer contact from the keyer or key across the PTT contact on the mic plug. It works flawlessly and is simpler to setup for me. I have the cable for the back too should this one fail for some reason, but this is more elegant for me. Notice all the RF blocking devices I have added to the lines to reduce (read that as eliminate) erroneous characters from being sent due to stray RF.

After my little interlude on 40 meter CW, I switched radios to the sBitx to be able to work some FT8 on 40 meters as well… This was not a great idea as the SWR was 3.5:1 in the part of the band and I didn’t want to risk damage to the finals so I made one contact and then moved to 20 meters for the duration of the activation. Once on 20 meters, this is where things REALLY took off for me today. I started hunting and pouncing on contacts on FT8 before I finally just setup on an empty slot and started calling CQ myself. This produced a lot of contacts. A really good run ensued and I was glad to see that I was able to put many calls in the log on this day with the sBitx. Shoot, I even worked a couple of SSB contacts as well, but it was a struggle to be honest with only about 9 watts or so in the SSB portion since my antenna is tuned for the CW portion of the band.

Here is a rare glimpse into my “go” kit for my Ten Tec Argonaut 5 as a CW kit. I need to add the microphone to it so I can use it for SSB as well but I am not sure if the SSB mod has been done to this one yet. Haha. It works so well for CW that I have not bothered to check! But the kit contains the radio, tuner, wire antenna, key and keyer plus all the cabling to get everything connected. It is only missing a power source but that is by design. I carry batteries for remote ops or plug into the truck for mobile operations which is why I dont have a battery in the kit.

Here we have yours truly operating the sBitx on FT8 and to be honest, it works almost too well for this. To the point that I am almost not even interested in the other modes with it… Almost… I love working from the bed cover if it is nice outside as it is the perfect height for my uses.

This was a great day for radio and the logbook reflects it, looks like the solar cycle is picking up for the winter run! This is the time to get on ten meters and work some DX yall! I should know as the next blog post will reveal next week!

73

David

Roadside POTA in the rain for the win!

Today once again saw the Ten Tec Argonaut come out of hiding to make some CW contacts. I really love using this radio for some reason and it has become a permanent part of my POTA kit at this point. If I travel and take radios, this is one of them that I take now. I just love the whole thing..,

This is what my POTA wagon looks like most of the time now. Antennas are in the tube, COAX rolled and at the ready next to it. Camping chairs stay in the truck now, I dont even unload them anymore. Lol. Then a laundry list of other stuff stored in totes to keep it somewhat organized. This is why I like the hardshell bed covers, it turns my truck into an overgrown car with a giant trunk.

When I got there it had just started sprinkling rain so I decided to setup in the truck and just use CW for a change. This means using one of my all time favorite CW rigs for POTA… the Ten Tec Argonaut 5. So I hastily deploy an antenna and a single little radial and hop in the truck to avoid the rain.

Funny thing is, the rain never happened…

I went ahead with the activation anyway as planned. This also meant I got the N3ZN key out as well as the Hamgadgets Picokeyer. This combination is a great little setup but today my mojo was off for a while or something. I couldn’t seem to get my act together and send decent code for some reason… about 15 minutes in, I guess I got warmed up and was able to do much better but those first few contacts were rough.

As you can see from the report above, the space weather was kinda strange that day with the high probability of a flare coupled with the K index being elevated as well, but the noise floor was really low so what does a guy do?

I got on the air with CW is what I did. The band was fading pretty good but it was workable so I started working some contacts. You can see below that one of my RBN reports shows that I had pretty strong signals at times. The QSB was deep at times though and this made getting contacts a little challenging at times. It is always fun, but some outings are more fun than others…lol.

The station is convenient in the cab of the truck but it is also noisy. You have to balance the ambient noise level with your mode and comfort level. Here you can see a car has just went by. This can be so loud that I can’t roll down my window for the car noise of some cars. Another option for CW here is to wear headphones and this has worked in the past, but today I didn’t bother with them.

That is another beautiful thing about FT8. I can turn the volume all the way to zero and still make contacts just fine. This is nice when it gets really hot as I can idle the truck and run the AC…lol or be in a noisy environment like here and still make contacts with ease. Just something to think about when choosing your location.

In this photo, I am holding the cable up to show I have wired it to the PTT input on the front of the radio. I made this cable up for 3 reasons:

1. The cable is easier to connect as the port on the back is right next to the heat sink and is hard to work with at times.

2. This location reduces the chance of stray RF causing the keyer to send erroneous dits and dahs since the coax is on the other side of the radio.

3. The cable is shorter and thereby easier to deploy and stow when done.

This was an experiment to see if the Picokeyer could also operate the PTT line on the front of the radio as you can use the hand mic like a straight key on these Ten Tec radios.

As you can see from the log, I had a regular ole QSO ragchew style contact right off the bat. This is from the fact he must have been simply on frequency when I called QRL to see if anyone was there. He answered and we had a nice little chat before I even got started with my usual POTA stuff. I was a little surprised by the band opening to the west coast as I got Washington state, Utah and New Mexico all in the log on this day. Usually 20 meters and a hamstick don’t play well with the west coast. Especially from a super compromised location like I am using here. Maybe it had more to do with my ground plane was deployed south and west today. You see, at the other local park I am normally deploying the radials to the North, East and South but the orientation of the parking lot is such that I can’t easily deploy a radial to the west. This doesn’t seem to matter for 17 and 15 meters though as I routinely get stations from out west on these bands…who knows?…

Triple mode activation at US-2169 with 2 radios!

Today was a good day for POTA as I was able to get contacts with 3 different modes in a single activation. Did I mention it rained too?

So today saw the deployment of so many hard shell cases to the park. I went ahead and staged both radios in the truck cab so if it started raining (which it did) I could have access to both radios anyway without having to get outside in the rain. Today saw me use the sBitx V3 as well as the Ten Tec Scout 555 Amateur Transceiver. I like Ten Tec radios when it comes to CW so I wanted the Scout for this mode. I forgot though that I have not outfitted this radio with an external keyer like I did the Argonaut 5. So with the Argonaut still tucked away in the bed of the truck, I just decided to send everything today by hand.

As you can see in the photo below, I ran the hamsticks so I could stay dry inside the truck if it started raining… seems today that was a good call. I only put out the 20 meter radials and the 20 meter ham stick. I thought about hopping on 15 meters for a little bit but the closer the rain clouds got the less I wanted to be handling lightening rods…. I mean, antennas in these conditions.

I checked it with the nanoVNA and the shape of the curve today was such that the CW portion was really well centered and was 1.1:1 on SWR with the chart climbing to 2:1 at the upper band edge. This was completely usable so I didnt bother to tune anything further and just got on the air…and by “tune” I mean “moving the radials around till the SWR plot moves to where I want it in the frequency spectrum”…lol. I can push and pull the SWR null on the VNA by changing the location of the radials in relation to the truck. I am assuming that I am simply tinkering with the capacitance and inductance of the radials as compared to the antenna and it allows me to correct for things…most of the time.

I first worked a few SSB stations before giving up and heading down to the CW portion of the band to see what I could find down there. Seems there was plenty to find as once I setup on frequency and called CQ a couple of times, I had a nice little pileup that lasted for about 15 minutes straight. I was able to work 15 contacts in that time as well. For me, this is “efficient” CW and really fun.

SSB seemed to be thin on stations today and the band was not really happy with this mode, I struggled to get just 5 contacts in the log today on this mode and normally it is much easier to land many more contacts here with the 50 watts that I was able to use. Maybe I bumped my mic gain and had it turned down or something, I just wasn’t getting any takers on SSB for some reason…

The Ten Tec Scout 555 is almost the perfect POTA radio in my book. It needs a nice brick wall IF crystal filter in my opinion, to be fair, as nearby stations would bleed in on the QSO with their energy sometimes. I could tighten up the IF filter width, but the stations would still numb the receiver occasionally and I think a nice 500hz 8 pole crystal filter would be pretty sweet here to solve that… I am looking at a nice audio filter but who knows…I might just try making an IF filter myself at some point. Once I had cleared the pile up I put away the Ten Tec Scout 555 and deployed the HF Signals sBitx V3 (mine is actually a V2 but I have performed the V3 update so going forward I am going to call it a V3)

The only mode I used the sBitx on today was FT8. I wanted to work a few FT8 contacts as well and had synced the time with the internet prior to leaving the house today so I knew it would be good to go. Boy did it deliver on the promise of getting me some FT8 contacts! Once again I stayed on 20 meters and just ran with it as I am also a little bit lazy at times and this was an easy win for me...haha.

I really like the layout and implementation of the sBitx. It is a really fun little radio. Although this radio is missing some stuff inside but that it what makes it so economical too. Things that some people might call “nonnegotiable” like shielding between the RF and computer sections… but I digress. It works for me even with the little rough around the edges stuff here and there.

Now, below is what the sky started looking like by the time I finished playing with CW and decided to get on with FT8. It was scary dark and ominous and then the rain started to fall. I really didn’t mind the rain as I had taped up the coax connection on the antenna and was confident it wouldn’t give me any trouble. What I didn’t factor in was the lightening…

Well, the rain fell and got more intense and more intense as I happily worked FT8 on 20 meters. After a few minutes, the waterfall on the radio exhibited a strange phenomenon. It turned yellow and red (the colors representing the strongest signals)… the whole thing was showing a 599 +30dB signal that covered the entire segment of 20 meters I was watching. This happened to be 6khz of spectrum on the waterfall and at first I thought something was wrong with the radio. Turns out, the radio is fine, this is simply what happens when the atmosphere charges up with static right before a lightening strike! I noticed after a couple of cycles that I would hear thunder off in the distance and then the waterfall would return to normal and slowly start to turn yellow and red again, till I would hear thunder and the cycle would repeat. This was fascinating to say the least, what was more intriguing though was that I continued to make contacts with that much band noise in play. FT8 is a true weak signal mode if I ever saw one.

This is what I am speculating is static charge up in the atmosphere in the photo above of the FT8 waterfall. For those that dont know, this mode does a sort of “talk and listen” thing where your radio sends a message for 15 seconds, the listens for 15 seconds for the other station. So the waterfall wont display anything while I am transmitting since the receiver is turned off. You can see that the cycle right before I sent and how the band was fine and then I send for 15 seconds and then when I go back to listen again, the band is filled with noise.

Let’s shift gears for a minute, the internet is an amazing place. I made this contact at 16:53 UTC and got this email notification just a few minutes later. That is pretty awesome to be honest about it. I remember mailing cards and it might take a month to get one back…

After I finished the activation and waited on the storm to pass, I wanted to do a simple test of the sBitx for a ham that had sent an email asking about the sBitx and how bad were the “birdies” on any given band. I dialed through the 20 meter CW portion up the the FT8 region (14.074mhz) and found what is noted below. In the above photo, you can see the strongest birdie I encountered on this band. That color means it is quite strong in signal level, so if a station was on that frequency, you would not hear it.

I noticed some were strong but they are also very localized. Literally only 200hz wide at the most. I don’t know if this is really band or not, but there were 4 distinct birdies in just the CW portion of the band. If you were worried about this before and didn’t want to have buyers remorse later, then consider me “taking one for the team” as I didn’t have this intel before. I can still recommend this radio for field expedient FT8 and POTA activations as it just works. Sometimes it will ignore a reply to your CQ on FT8 so you have to pay attention to the display on each cycle, but it mostly catches them.

Something I have learned about propagation is that the three modes I am using carry different levels of signal quality to make them effective. SSB (single side band for the newcomer) takes the award for needing the best band conditions of my three regular POTA modes. If the bands wont allow SSB to work or all the stations are “down in the noise” then I move to CW which requires much less propagation to work for me (especially with a good receiver). BUT it pales in comparison to FT8 when it comes to signal to noise ratio. I am blown away that when CW contacts are fading in and out and are in the noise floor that FT8 will be active and I can easily make contacts with it.

This is a day when SSB was “in the mud” but CW was rocking and rolling and had it been in poor shape, I would have went to FT8 for my ten before quitting and going to lunch. Lol

73 - WK4DS

Raccoon creek WMA POTA with the sBitx V3 SDR transceiver

Today saw me head over to Alabama to activate a nearby park that I have never been to before. Us-9875 Raccoon Creek Wildlife Management Area is a beautiful place right on the Tennessee river between Stevenson Alabama and Flat Rock Alabama.

I drive over to the WMA and find no one there at all, this is awesome as I like it when I have the place to myself. It gives me the freedom to setup the radio anywhere or in any manner I choose without having to worry about people walking into the radials or anything like that. Well, I get there and promptly decide to setup on 20 meters as I wanted to not spend a lot of time today activating as I wanted to also record a YouTube video for our brand new channel about amateur radio as well as have time to enter and upload the log from today and edit the video once I got back home.

If you want to see the video I made when I did this activation, the link is here. I didn’t film the whole activation, but rather pulled segments in and just did some of it, so you might be in it and you might not…lol. If people want the whole activation recorded in all it’s lengthy glory, I am not opposed to doing that, but I will need to hear that from the people…

When I want to do FT8 in the field I always grab this radio. The sBitx V3 is an SDR that is built around a Raspberry Pi SBC and uses a touchscreen for most functions. It only has two input devices on the radio, the VFO knob which never changes and the multi-function knob which literally can be used to adjust everything else…literally. It does have ports for a CW key, headphones, and a microphone on the side right above the power switch too. Since it uses a RPi4, it can be driven with a mouse and keyboard and during this activation I use the mouse to select FT8 stations to call. It is really handy for that. I find that if I am simply entering a call sign to chase on FT* I can use the built in keyboard instead of taking a separate keyboard. Another thing it has is Bluetooth, so Bluetooth devices will work on it too…such as a keyboard… I really like this radio if you have not figured that out yet.

Propagation was all over the place today as you can see on the beacon report above that I was weak at -19dB into “3” land but just a half hour earlier I was able to work JI3MJK in Japan! That is almost 7000 miles away!!! So if your activating and it seems like no one can hear you and you are about to give up, I would recommend that you give it another half hour, if possible, as the system might flip in your favor! That is what happened today.

I grabbed this photo below of the screen during boot up, it shows the OS version which is JJ’s 64 bit version 3.025 and that it knows who I am and where I have set the GRID to. This is important if you are doing POTA as you need to communicate that when you work FT8 at some distant location. The FT8 community is really into grids and want to collect them all…so pay attention to your grid. It is also showing the FT8 stations as they come in as well below that in green letters. Fortunately, it is really easy to change the grid on the sBitx so you dont have to worry too much about it.

So I setup in the truck and to be honest about it, I am really starting to like this concept. I am in the shade for the most part, if I am running FT8 only, I can run the engine and have AIR CONDITIONING at my POTA operation!!! Can we say WINNING!!! Ha Ha… I have done that once so far when I was in Florida if memory serves me but I would have to check. Using CW is a little tougher though. The diesel engine is loud enough to make copy of weak stations really hard so I don’t run it if I am working CW.

I normally try to work some CW though as I really love the mode so I normally will roll down all the windows in the summer and put my windshield sun protector in the window and work a bunch of those CW ops if the bands permit it.

A neat little addendum to the sBitx radio is that since it is driven by a Raspberry Pi 4, it can use a mouse and keyboard if you prefer it. Supposedly it has keyboard CW character generation too, but I have not attempted to do that yet. So if you are not able to send very well, this might be a solution for you. The mouse makes it much easier to choose stations that are calling CQ so you can pick them out on your end and you are not obligated to just call and answer CQ calls yourself. Farhan put a lot of thought into this radio and it shows.

Here is a little discussed subject…extra gear. I know we all take it with us but what do you normally carry with you when you go into the field? I have done POTA long enough now that I have sorted it out to just what I need and some redundant spares of failure prone items. Things like extra coax and another antenna are always in the spare tote.

The location that I setup at did have a really nice view of the river. This location is right next to the John Snodgrass bridge. This is the bridge over the river for Alabama Highway 117 to Stevenson.

As you can see from the logbook, there was a great run on 20 meters CW then another great run on FT8 as well! I even netted a J call on FT8! What a great day to do radio and the weather was great to boot.

POTA on the 4th of July…hold for second operator.

Today I went for a morning POTA activation at US-2169 and on my way over to the park, I gave KG4WBI (Roger) a call and invited him to join me. He agreed and after a little while of my working some CW on 15 meters, he arrived with a thermos of coffee and an eagerness to make some contacts!

Since I was ahead of him, I went ahead and setup the station complete with a full compliment of radials so I could use any band I wanted (of the 5 I have hamsticks for at this time...) and got it tuned up on 15 meters by making a slight adjustment to one of the radials. As you can see, I chose the usual spot for today’s activation. This was on purpose as I knew the lower area (which is actually where I kind of wanted to go, to be honest) was really busy with holiday traffic. This also meant that there would be more RF noise down there from inverters in the campground and such too.

This upper parking lot doesn’t see near as much traffic so I knew that it would be a much quieter RF environment. Sometimes you just have to choose between comfort (the lower area is in the shade under a bunch of old growth trees) and a quieter location so I could hear better. I chose to hear better since I knew Roger was coming. It wasn’t too bad, but it did get fairly hot towards the end of the activation to be honest about it.

With the antenna strung up and adjusted, I need to choose a radio. The radio turned out to be the Ten Tec Scout 555 because of the power output on SSB(50 watts). I knew we would be using SSB today and wanted to be able to make a bunch of contacts with it since Roger was going to be there as I am secretly addicting him to POTA a little at a time…hehehe. It worked as we operated together while he was there and I made sure he got enough contacts to get his first activation from US-2169. Now to get him an account and to upload his first log so all the hunters will get credit for his contacts too.

The Scout is a really great POTA rig as it has minimal controls on the front to the point that it has what you need and nothing else to be honest about it. It needs a couple more in my opinion and I may just get another one to build into something fun with some more front panel controls on it. But for now, this one works perfectly and I don’t want to risk killing it as I use it as my SSB POTA machine now. Before this one I had only made a handful of SSB contacts at parks and now I have dozens in the time since purchasing this radio. I really love the compact nature of the radio to be honest, I compare it to my Argonaut 5 in usability with more RF output…

Here is another insider tip…You can connect the CW key and the microphone at the same time, this doesn’t seem unusual till you find out there is no mode switch to go between these two modes. You simply start keying CW on the key and it will transmit CW, and then you can key the microphone and transmit SSB in the next moment with no other interaction with the radio other than picking up the microphone. This is really awesome, but it comes with a caveat. The radio is transmitting CW on the SSB mode. This means that you have to adjust the frequency off from the desired frequency by the amount of the side tone, which is about 700 hertz. On top of that, you also have to shift the radio opposite of the sideband direction you are using. So if your on 40 meters, then you have to be 700hz above the desired frequency and if your on 15 meters, then you have to be 700hz below the frequency. This took me a little bit to figure out too as I am used to being able to simply dial the frequency and call it good. So in the photo below, I am actually on 21.042mhz… As the radio warmed up, it shifted in frequency a little. This is why it is important to do two things, let the radio warm up before getting on the air and look at the display from time to time to confirm things have not changed.

What is nice about taking a pile of pelican style cases (none of them are actually pelican cases) is that you can have a ton of extra gear with you so if something goes awry, you have spares. Another thing that happens is you will have access to your favorite hardware like my N3ZN cw key! So I get it out of the case for the Argonaut 5, which is where I store it normally and use it for this activation. The Scout has two key inputs on the back, one if for a straight key and the other is for a paddle. Well, if I use my Picokeyer, then it goes into the straight key input. The paddle input is fed to a Curtis keyer chip and that is built into the radio. The only downside to this keyer, which works beautifully BTW, is that it does’t have memories. I like having memories for POTA as you end up sending some information A LOT and it takes some of the sending burden off of me so I can log and check the radio and such. Turning the page on the log book seems to be a good reason to use memories on the keyer too… lol. If you have the need for a dead simple CW memory keyer, I can recommend the Hamgadgets Picokeyer VERY HIGHLY, it works flawlessly and runs what seems like forever on a single coin cell battery. I am closing in on a year for this one and it is showing no signs of needing a battery yet…

No matter how many radios you take though, if you forget your log book, you will end up logging in your journal…like I did today. I luckily took my journal with me as I like to make notes about all sorts of stuff while I am out and this is another good reason to have it. This is not the first time I have defaulted to this notebook either, it has bailed me out more than once…lol. I did have plenty of pens though so that wasn’t a problem.

Since I got there before Roger, I built the radio out and hopped on 15 meters CW and started calling CW POTA and got some really interesting answers to that call! I worked a station in the UK as well as Germany! The Hamstick is not the worst antenna out there is what I have some to understand. If conditions are not too bad, I can easily work Europe and South America on 15 meters above. Today was no different. I was able to get a couple of DX stations as well as K2E special event station!

Once Roger arrived we switched over to SSB and attempted to make some contacts first on 15 meters, and then 17 meters with literally zero answers on SSB. You see, Roger is still working on his code so he prefers SSB at this time for things like this. So rather than frustrate him with having to listen to code he is struggling with, I opted to set the hook deep and get on SSB.

I think my idea worked, he was really stoked to work so many ops in such a short time. We had a blast and everyone was super nice while we bumbled around handing the mic back and fourth. It was hilarious at times, but we had fun so I am happy. It happened so fast that I had to come up with some really fast shorthand to know which calls we had given “Two Op status” to and which ones I worked by myself. Plus the notebook was also the wrong one and the calls were happening so much faster on SSB, the notebook is a mess.

I can honestly say that taking a second op along to do multi-op POTA is really fun and if you have not done it yet, consider giving it a shot sometime.

The below photo shows you what it looks like to make sure you are hydrated on these hot summer days in Georgia. I have a Nalgene bottle which I am using first since it is not insulated and then a Hydra-flask which is insulated and makes for cool water even when it is burning hot outside of the bottle. On top of that we were drinking coffee while there too, that is just silly if you think about it…

This is the messiest logbook I think I have ever created. Notes just scribbled here and there, edits run roughshod through out the 5 pages, and you can see that it means we had a great 4th of July activation. Thank you to all the hunters that came out to support us on the air and I look forward to recreating something like this again in the near future.

73

David - WK4DS

Classic CW Activation!!! Ten Tec Argonaut V for the win!

I don’t know if you have a favorite radio or not, but I do. The Ten Tec Argonaut V is one of my all time favorite portable CW rigs and for good reason! This radio brings all that is CW and Ten Tec together in the perfect combination of fun and ease of use.

Of course, this radio also has several other modes (although I could not tell you all of them as I have never switched it off of CW) but it will do other modes as well. All that said, it is a wonderful little CW machine and the ergonomics for use with CW show through in the design of the radio. From the minimalist layout to the proper location of critical operating controls, this radio is just about perfect. The only other thing that would make this radio even better would be the inclusion of Collins mechanical filters in the IF..but I digress… (Giving a quick nod to my Omni 7).

You see, when you’re activating a park with a small CW radio, you only need a few controls to be able to work the contacts coming in. The main two being the RIT for stations that are off your beat frequency by more than is comfortable (I had one of these today) and the filter bandwidth adjustment. These are the same knob on the Argonaut 5 and it is a simple button press to switch between these two functions. Another point to consider is these buttons are grouped near each other too so you are not searching all over the radio for the controls you need to work your activation. Along with these two controls the only other one I use while activating is the volume to bring down strong signals and it is also right next to the other controls, keeping the process really clean for me. Honestly the radio seems to be laid out with the “set-n-forget” stuff on the left side and the “active-use-while-operating” controls on the right now that I look at it.

Enough of me gushing on about the radio, we all know that I love this little machine…So onto the key and keyer. The key is my N3ZN travel key and it is fed into a HamGadgets Picokeyer both which are wonderful devices and work exceedingly well with the Ten Tec Argonaut V amateur radio. It has been a while since I have used the Hamgadgets Picokeyer so I had to get out the owners manual to see how to change one of the settings. Taking copies of the manuals is something I am a huge proponent of as it just makes sense. Without this book I would have been searching online, and sometimes that is not available at a park. The paper book never has a “dead battery” and is always ready to serve you. Take copies of the books with you…

A good cup of coffee is crucial to a good activation!

I went to my old haunt today US-2169 to get on the air and work some CW contacts as the space weather showed that the sun was still being friendly. I get to the park and find that it is starting to rain so I hurriedly setup my hamstick for 20 meters (I didn’t want to change bands alot with it raining…) and threw some electrical tape on the coax connector for a temporary rain jacket and got back in the truck. Pro-tip about electrical tape, turn it around backwards with the sticky side out and twist the end of the tape so it is easy to grab and unwind later if you don’t want the adhesive sticking to your parts. Things like the putting it on the coax connector as a temporarily rain shield is the perfect application for this idea. When you are done just unwind the tape and put it in the trash.

I had setup a new radial field design today as an experiment to see if adding a really long radial would work (or even help) and was pleasantly surprised to find it did! I really love using the nanoVNA to measure my antenna instead of a simple SWR meter, even though today I used the SWR function instead of the smith chart.

The power of the smith chart can not be overstated either. What you get to see on the smith chart is the data that the SWR plot shows (well, it shows the impedance and you have to know a little math to turn it into SWR) and is also shows you if your system is capacitive, inductive or purely resistive (the best option if you get to pick). Now this doesn’t mean your signal is going to get out to some distant DX station super well just because the SWR is 1:1, but your transceiver wont have to deal with reflected signals coming back down the line out of phase with the transmitted signal. I was a ham for way to long before I learned the power of the smith chart…and I have just scratched the surface of what can be done with it. All that to say that 1.061:1 is a great SWR for a field deployed antenna…lol

Just for fun I decided to look and see what the SSB segment would be since I tuned this antenna to center frequency on the CW portion and it is still good in this configuration. Dont let any SWR reading below 2:1 scare you, all radios are designed to be able to work into at least that much SWR as EEs (Electrical Engineers - the guys who actually design radios) know that these devices are going to end up in not-so-perfect applications and want them to work anyway.

The measurements, roughly, for these radials are 14’6” and 26’ respectively and they are laid out with the shorter one being 90 degrees to the truck. This is the position that I tuned the antenna at, with this radial as well as it’s mate running out the other side 180 degrees out from this one.

The 26’ radial is run pretty much away from the truck to the rear and it gets the benefit of running down the slope too. This angle adjusts the impedance of the antenna by changing the reactance. This is why discone antennas have the ground plane at 45 degrees sloping down, it presents a near perfect impedance to the transceiver. I will repeat this setup on my next trip and put the smith chart on it to see what it says about the system, I am curious to know now…

I keep this Ultra Picokeyer from Hamgadgets and the N3ZN portable CW key with the Argonaut V so every time I use this radio, I will have a memory keyer and nice paddle to operate it with. It had been a hot minute since I had used the Ultra Picokeyer so I needed to get the manual out for it. Seems for some reason last time I used it, I had enabled the internal tone (for use as a practice oscillator) and wanted to silence it for the activation. I knew how to get into the menu, but I didn’t remember the item name specifically, so out comes the book…

I can not stress how important it is to me to have the manuals to the devices I am using, stored with the kit. The only exception is when the device is so simple and intuitive that you don’t need one anyway (like with the Penntek TR-35 transceiver). So I keep home-made copies of manuals to both the Ultra Picokeyer and the Ten Tec Argonaut V transceiver in the hard shell case with them. They have saved me a couple of times already. Me and my friend KG4WBI (Roger) have this obsession with printing the manuals and then building them into these term paper booklets so we will have them later, I have so many manuals at this point, I have manuals for radios I no longer own…lol.

The 20 meter band was actually really good today. There is supposed to be significant solar problems right now as a problematic sunspot is pointing our way but I was graced with a little time to get on the air and was greeted with quite a few hunters to my surprise! As you can see in the beacon report below I was getting into New Hampshire quite well!

Some observations from today that I noticed were that I was getting states that I shouldn’t have been hearing… States like Alabama, North Carolina and even GEORGIA! I don’t ever get this kind of NVIS operation on 20 meters, I usually have to go to 40 meters to see this sort of thing happen.

Another thing was I was getting some pretty heavy QSB (fading of the signal) at times as well. The QSB even seemed to come and go which was normal to be honest for this sort of thing, but what made it unusual for me today was how deep it was. 599 signals would just disappear for 2 seconds the fade back in. Deep…

Fortunately I was able to get all the information for my log. There was a significant amount of US ops only on this day too. I figured there would be a few more Canadians as well but I only worked one on this day . It is always great to get some of our friends to the North in the log.

The diversity in the log spread today can not be understated. I was blown away with all those southern states coming back to me. Strange conditions for sure, maybe the new radial idea improved NVIS, maybe they have always been able to hear me and when I would activate there just wasn’t anyone hunting… I don’t know, but today they were there and I was stoked! Thanks for coming along and I hope to see you in the comments below.

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

Little Manatee River State Park K-1898

I had some time today and wanted to get out of the city here in Tampa so I went to Little Manatee River State Park and setup a quick little activation on 15 meters.

This park is really nice and well cared for. It has many hiking trails as well as a creek on one side that you can canoe in…just dont pet the alligators and you will be fine there, but they do have an equestrian area as well. Plenty to do if you want to do something other than park activations for some reason…lol

Today saw me setup on the bed cover agian as it was nice out and I was mostly in the shade so I knew I wouldnt get too hot. I ran CW only as I didn’t feel like messing with the sBitx V3 to work FT8 as I really only had about 30 minutes of operating time and for me, the FT8 contacts come in a little slower than the CW contacts. I did choose 15 meters though which was a little bit of a gamble, but it worked out once I got on the air and tuned around the band a little and found it was active, I rested a little easier.

I ran the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 transceiver today with the N3ZN key and Hamgadgets memory keyer. This radio is a joy to use for CW and I really enjoy using it for park activations. It has about 20 watts full output, but today I was only running 15 watts as I normally don’t push the old transistors as hard as when they are new… probably don’t matter, but in my mind it makes sense. When I am operating, I use 3 things, well 4 if you count the AF gain (volume). I use the multi-function knob to control the BW (band width of the filter) and the RIT control. The same knob does both jobs, you just hit which ever button you need first then set that function to what you want. The display is currently showing the BW setting of 600 Hz. I will open it up if the band is quiet, but this thing is pretty selective and will allow me to go down to 250 or 300 Hz if I need it and works really well.

Today also saw the use of zero radials. I wanted to see what the SWR would be without anything since these antennae are designed to be used without a counterpoise and just work off the coax shield and car body. I was pleasantly surprised when the nanoVNA showed 1.3 to 1 right out of the chute! Seems my antenna for the band is tuned a little low like this. If I add the 20 meter radials it balances better and move the frequency up closer to where I operate and gets that super deep null right on me.

I did experiment a little with how I laid out the coax to see what it would do and the result was minimal to say anything. I think I changed the reading by .01 SWR from start to finish. Totally not worth the extra effort to optimize the coax… The photo below shows me pointing at the best setup I found and the screen of the VNA showing my target frequency on a 4Mhz slice of spectrum.

I had problems with RF in my keyline. I am guessing due to the proximity of my key and keyer to the antenna. With electronic keying, rf can trigger the keying circuit adding unwanted dots and dashes to your code. I solved this by adding rf chokes to literally everything. If you will notice they are on the key cable as well as the keyer to radio cable and I still have that huge one on the coax as well. I have not added them to the power cables yet but might to see if it will help.

At the end of the day, all POTA is good POTA and I had a wonderful time working a ton of stations. The Ten Tec Argonaut 5 is a great little radio and I count my blessing for being able to land one for reasonable money. If you are a CW guy, then I suggest you try some of the Ten Tec radios as they are simply sublime machines for this mody. I quickly became an addict of their radios and will continue to be for many years to come. Thanks and I hope you get on the air and have some fun soon!

73 - WK4DS

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

Activated a new-to-me park today! K-3958

Today was a good day for POTA. I activated North Chickamauga Creek Wildlife Management Area and it was fun! You see, for me to get 80 QSOs in one outing recorded into the log is a feat of the airwaves, so that made this trip one for the books!

K-3958 is also just outside of Soddy Daisy Tennessee at the foot of Mobray mountain. I was concerned when I chose this park that I would have trouble securing the activation as this parking area is right at the base of the previously mentioned mountain. I decided to give it a shot anyway though since I have had great activations at Cloudland in a similar scenario. This WMA is also situated is a gorge and goes right up to the side of the road, the problem is unlike K-0716 on the north end of Lookout mtn where there is a pulloff, this park doesn’t have one on the road. This means my only shot at activating this park today was to find a spot inside the actual parking area itself.

So I roll into the parking lot and start looking for a space that would be suitable for setting up a station out of the truck. I quickly realized that since it was Saturday and near town that it was a popular “waterpark” for the local youth. The lot was almost COMPLETELY full with only a few spaces that were not suitable for most cars. Since I drive a huge 4x4 truck though, this problem posed little challenge for me. I soon found the spot you see in the photos and got started building a radio station. I had just enough room to fit into this space too as you see here, the truck just did clear the trees.

Well, this was kinda tough as to get out of the road, I had to back right up to the bushes. So here I am, bushwhacking my way around the back of the truck as I get out the mount, antennas and run a coax to the cab of the truck. I ran the station from the front seat today in an effort to keep dust under control as the road is literally 7 feet away and is gravel. Compound this with people driving pretty fast as well and it was fairly dusty at times. This was the main reason for giving up on the outside station idea today.

Once setup, I start considering my plan, I figured that I would start on 20 meters so I could be sure to get enough QSOs to secure the activation as the spot page showed a disproportionate amount of activity on this band. Well, let me tell you that my fears about not being able to make contact from this location were completely unfounded. This location could hear just fine. I setup on 20 meters and start calling CQ and it didnt take long at all to get a run of contacts in the log that secured the activation! After that they just kept going and going and going!

Parking is kinda tough here, you have to get the right spot for POTA and on a nice Saturday, this lot is FULL, I recommend coming through the week so there is more room.

This is what the parking lot looked like. Just cars pulled out of the way of moving traffic on the side of the road for the most part. Some spaces were built into the tree line like where I parked and then a ton were like this photo above. Almost all of them had cars in them too. The ones in the trees that were open also normally has something that made a car being there a bad idea, like mine had this huge rock in it but I had enough ground clearance to fit anyway so it all worked out

Today’s weapon of choice was the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 feeding into my hamstick collection. This is one of my all time favorite radios even though it is larger than my other rigs. It is capable of 20 watts but I never run it that hard with 15 watts being my personal maximum output power. Today saw it running at that 15 watt level because I was thinking I needed it to get over Mobray mountain since I was setup literally right at the foot of it. Across the road from where I was setup it starts going uphill and goes straight up the side of the mountain. In my opinion, this is probably the worst possible location to setup a radio, but it worked today so I am not going to complain…

I have found that the hard shell case for the radio makes a great table to sit it on. I like to use the radio in the passenger seat when I run solo ops (which is most of the time). I like this operating position as it allows me to sit comfortably in the truck and operate. This keeps me out of the sun, and I can activate in the rain from this position as well. The Dodge arm rest in the 2005 year model is a huge flat surface too so it turns into a nice little table. Since it is vinyl upholstered, the key doesn’t move around at all on it either, making this the almost perfect work surface for my POTA fun time shenanigans! If you will notice, the window behind the radio was only slightly down. This is because I was trying to minimize the dust buildup in the truck from people flying by right in front of me, there seemed to be no shortage of fast drivers in this tight area for some reason…

Well I sat on 20 meters for about an hour and made contacts the WHOLE TIME! Wow! The hunters were out in force today!!! I made FOURTY NINE QSOs in just over an hour!!! That is awesome! I looked at the POTA page for this park and that one thing alone put me on the top five activator QSO board. It is going to be a great day for the WK4DS POTA operation…

So at this point the QSO rate had dropped off and I figured I would try 17 meters to see what I could do there. Well, there was RF in the shack on this band and this little PICO Keyer is not RF friendly…at all, if there is RF near it, it will start sending strange characters and it would do this on 17 meters today, this told me the SWR was probably a little high due to the position of the counterpoise and so I folded on 17 and went instead to 30 meters.

The nice thing about 30 meters is that it allows you to operate into areas that is only reachable by BOTH 20 and 40 meters. It is strange in that it acts like both bands for some reason. I can make long distance contacts and then the next one will be in Georgia… You just never know with 30 meters how it will work. Well today it worked REALLY well, with me making 28 QSOs on this band in about the same number of minutes. The bands were on fire today! Wow! It did get me quite a few local states as well with North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi coming into the log at this point.

The photos above show what everybody was coming to see. The river is beautiful but the water was way down with only a small stream actually running right now and that made for several pools that the people would congregate around to swim in. I found a couple of fishermen at this spot and they said they were not having any luck due to the low water levels. I grabbed a couple of quick photos and headed back to the truck…

After having such good runs on 20 and 30 meters I figured I would drop down to 40 meters and see what was going on there. Forty meters was not happy today, well at this point in the day that is. Seems that the atmosphere was not happy with my attempt at this band and only allowed me 3 QSOs before I called it quits and went QRT with 80 QSOs in the log for one day. I wrapped up the radio and antenna system and then headed home with a new park and a ton of contacts, what else do you need for a great day of radio? I will go back to this park again but next time I want to go on a week day and see what I can do with less people in the park. But until then, I hope to hear you on the air. 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 POTA activation that was incredibly rewarding!!!

When we activate a park we never know what is going to happen.

So today is Labor day here in the USA. This is the first Monday in September set aside for the workers of this country to grill out with their buddies and such as that. So for me that means going out and setting up a POTA activation somewhere. I decided on Cloudland Canyon after deciding that the drive time to other parks would make the activation very short for me and I wanted more time on the air instead. I choose the upper parking lot since I wanted to use my hamstick system instead of rigging to the trees today. The trees I normally use have a lot of traffic today from hikers and I didn’t want them tripping over antenna wires all day so this just made sense. As you can see below, there was plenty of room for me here today…

I don’t know if I have shared this or not, but I have converted all of my hamsticks to this QD system so band changes are fast. It works really well, I do need to retune my antennas though as this did lengthen them a little and now they are all low on the meter for their center frequency… always something to do…lol.

Once installed, these mounts work really well and the tune is very stable, I have not seen it change at all from the numbers on the VNA since adding these QD adapters. So if you think you might want to use hamsticks for POTA, I really like them. Now to be honest, I don’t think I would use them for mobile (in motion on the roadway) use as there is a lot of leverage on this little mount and the spring is not that heavy to me, they might work fine like that and probably have been deployed that way, but for me, this is a site setup tool only.

Another reason for the hamstick setup is the use of the truck for shade during the activation. By strategic positioning of the truck I can leave the doors open with the engine off and not have RFI from the operating parts of the truck to contend with as well as having a natural shade from the sun too. I use this trick a lot when I don’t have a ton of time for an activation and want to operate in inclement weather like rain. Simple and robust, plus the system just works, look at the logbook below and tell me how hamsticks don’t work…

I carry all of the stuff in the photo below in the hard-shell case that I keep the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 in so I don’t have to search for cables or things like my key. It is all in there and I just grab the case and go. This makes life so much simpler for me. Seen in the photo is the Ham-gadgets Pico Keyer and the N3ZN tiny CW key I picked up at the Huntsville Hamfest. Once I get all the parts out of the case I close it up and use it in the passenger seat for the hard surface to place the radio on so it is out of the way while I use the center armrest for logging and sending CW.

Here you can see how simple the connection scheme is when running Hamstick antennas, there is no tuner or interconnecting cables, just the RF choke to the coax, the power cable (I plugged into the truck’s cigarette lighter port today) and the CW key cable and nothing else is needed. Simple is king here and it also makes setup fast. That is another reason I like using CW instead of other digital modes with this radio as well as my other radios to this point. They all need a computer and a sound card to get them to do digital modes (other than CW) and I normally don’t have a ton of time for all that setup and getting it going. CW is on the air really fast, like SSB. You can also see the silent fan mod I did a while back (there is a blog post showing what I did) and I really like this mod as it eliminated the fan noise entirely. I need to make a screen to protect the fan though, that is still a project to be done…

You have seen this view shown below in the past, but I included it today since I got the moon in the photo too… lol. I do like the system I have built for activating a park with a hamstick, it is really fast to deploy and when I do a rove, I simply coil up the counterpoise wires and lay them in the truck bed. pull off the radiator from the QD base and lay it in the bed of the truck too, unplug the coax and coil up the portion to get it inside the truck and I am off to the next park. The antenna mount can ride in the receiver hitch easily enough so it is not an issue. This sounds like a lot but it literally happens in two minutes tops and I am driving to the next park.

Another thing I did today was hook up the inline power meter. Now I don’t remember why it only shows 8.9 watts of output. I had the radio set to 15 watts forward power so I probably took the photo after I let off of the key as the amp hour meter doesn’t clear till you disconnect it from power. I don’t remember if I had it in tune mode or if I was simply sending dashes. But what I was looking for was the total amp hours of use, this tells me if my little 8A/h battery would hold up to a heavy activation. From this meter reading it will. Now remember, this is with the radio set to 15 watts too, so under a normal activation of 5 to 8 watts, this would last for many hours. Today I went for two hours and got 70 contacts in the log and only used 3.68A/h and that makes me much more confident in using the smaller battery for activations now. I had my concerns before but now I don’t. Another point here is that I normally try to add something else to the activation that has to do with information gathering so I also learn something that I didn’t know before, today it was the amp hour info.

So I get to the park and take my time and listen to the bands a few minutes once the rig is installed and decide to start on 40 meters as the noise level was really low today. I get on the air at 13:25 UTC (9:25 local time) and start calling CQ… It didn’t take long to secure the activation and I had not left 40 meters! I don’t get on the lower bands too often as I am not at the park at night when the bands are less noisy so I don’t get the hams in the closer states like Tennessee or Georgia, it was really nice to get some of those states in the log for a change. Hanging out on 15 and 17 meters nets much more distant stations so I have to remember to come back to 40 every once in a while…

I then move to 30 meters for a little while to see what I could do there and work several more people on 30 meters in about ten minutes of operating. 30 meters at this park is a crap shoot to be honest, some days it is quiet and some days it has this intermittent computer noise that just shuts the band down, today the noise was nowhere to be found to my delight!

Then…I…got…on…twenty…

First off, who doesn’t work Bill (K4NYM) if he is booming in to your station and for a Park to Park no less? So I hunted him before setting up on frequency. It took one try, he is an amazing operator and I aspire to operate as efficiently as him some day.

Things take off once I park on a frequency and start calling CQ. I promptly work a page and a half of calls then I get the one you see below. Not one to brush off anyone calling me, I take the time to have a nice QSO with him as he is working on getting on the air with CW and is having to do head copy only…I later learn… So I take the time to write down what he is sending so I can read it and respond when it is my turn. Turns out he is just now getting back active in CW after taking a long hiatus from it and also, he cant see, hence the head copy only. Talk about a person with conviction, he never gave up. I was so glad Justin called me and feel honored he felt confident in me enough to throw his call into the fray of POTA not knowing what would happen. That took guts.

Once we finished our QSO it was back to the POTA game in full swing. I struggled with one thing today more than anything else… stations zero beating me. It never fails, I get two or three stations that due to modern technology, will zero beat me perfectly. This in itself isn’t a problem and is really the most efficient QSO to have in CW, but what happens is that those two or three stations melt together into the one single tone and it is unintelligible. So If I don’t pull you out on the first try, move up or down 30 to 40 hertz, This will make you off frequency enough to sound different and you wont blend with the other stations and I will get you on the first try, this is an old contesting trick and by golly it works, I will have one station that stands out and is clearly definable and the rest is this one huge tone. I never really understood it till I was an activator trying to pull one call out of the mayhem, then I got it. Now when I hunt I leave my XIT or Transmit Incremental Tuning on and set 40 hz high just for this reason.

Once I hit 70 QSOs today I had been on the air for two straight hours so I went QRT and shut down the radio. It was a great activation and I really enjoyed working with a new (relatively speaking) ham on building his CW skills back up to what they were. So till next time get your radio out!!!

72

WK4DS - David

A couple of quick activations testing the antennas

The past couple of days have been busy and there was still time for a couple of quick activations along the way.

First stop is the Estelle Trailhead on Crockford Pigeon Mtn WMA (K-3742) over in LaFayette GA while coming home from visiting with my mom. This is actually a new park for me even though it is only 15 miles from home by road… I dont know why, but I have never activated it for some reason. The Estelle parking area is fully within the WMA boundary so it was a simple matter to pull in, get parked out of the road and setup a radio in the shade for a little while. Today saw the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 again as this radio was the one in the truck at the time. It is also one of my favorite HF radios at this point. It only lacks two things to be the perfect radio, an SWR meter and an internal antenna tuner…but I digress.

I said that I setup in the shade, but there really wasn’t much to start with…lol. I did get lucky and a nice cloud moved in after a few minutes and helped keep things cool. I don’t like to let my radios just sit and cook in the sun if I can help it and will go to fairly great lengths to prevent them from getting hot. This is what you see here. The shade was just wide enough to protect most of the radio from direct sun so it didn’t get very hot before the clouds moved in. On top of that the tool bag is shading my battery in this photo too, I didn’t want it to get too hot either…haha.

I started on 15 meters today as I finally have a 15 meter capable radio and antenna too! Well the RBN showed 29dB for me! That is crazy good for someone with 15 watts under their belt into “7” land. But try as I may, there just wasnt that many hunters on 15 meters for some reason. I did get 3 QSOs in the log while on 15 meters so all was not lost. Then I moved down to 17 meters and did quite well there, picking up several more contacts. Then I finished out the activation on 20 meters which is my backup if I need to get my 10 for the activation. 20 never seems to let me down either as I can almost garuntee at least a few contacts there.

So after getting the activation, I wanted to experiment with the antenna system and see how it would work on the drive home. Turns out the 20 meter hamstick without radials has worse SWR than with them, going from 1.15:1 up to 1.7:1. Who would have guessed? LOL. This is not a real problem though as this is still well below what I consider useable SWR. As long as I can stay below 2.5:1 I will operate. That is the upper limit though and I will work on the antenna a good bit to get it down but if nothing helps and I have 2.5:1 SWR, I will try it. The radios can handle anything below 3:1 so I set my personal threshold below that… I know some people wont use their gear if isn’t almost perfectly 1:1, but I have come to realize that it isn’t so important and the signal reports speak for themselves.

On the drive home, I start hearing this REALLY strong signal booming in to the Argonaut 5. The above photo shows what the signal level coming into the radio was 20 over S9, and remember that the Argonaut 5 has a S meter that doesn’t like to give out good signal reports. So I start working on head copy on the drive and finally get that it is W1AW/0 in Colorado and he (or she) is working as a POTA park! So I do what any sane POTA hunter would do, I pull over at the New Salem Firehall and work them mobile! WK4DS/M got into their log!!! WooHoo!!! So at the bottom of the logbook page you will see where I logged the hunter contacts on this trip since I was not at a park when I made these contacts.

New Salem Firehall parking lot was empty and worked great for getting my hunter contact on the drive home.

As a side note, I finally made the hitch pin (shown below) for my antenna mount so I can use it for the rover program without having to pull it off the truck and stow it between parks. I am working on reducing the setup and breakdown time at each park as I am going to attempt a 10 park rove and this will take planning to make it happen. Things like this can add up on the rove to make it take too long since the drive time from one park to the next will be the biggest time eater of the day. So if I can find simple little things that I can do on each stop to save time, I can make the most of the activation.

I made the main pin that holds the mount, but I simply bought the little pin to lock it in place. Sometimes it is smarter to buy a part rather than spend the time to make it. The main pin was easy enough to make from scrap shafting material. but to make the keeper pin would have taken more than the 3$ it cost in time so I opted to simply buy it instead. To be honest, it would have probably been smarter to buy the main pin too, but I had a scrap piece of round and time available on the lathe so I just carved one out right quick rather than drive to the store to buy one. Another plus is that I could make it like I wanted which included adding the handle to the main side so it is easier to pull when breaking down the system. On top of the pin making, I also opted to add an extra set of holes to the antenna mount so that the pin can be left in for simple POTA activation days where I dont have to pull the pin to simply setup for a single park. This allows me to just stick the mount in the hitch and use it like I have been and take it down when done so I can stow it inside the truck bed when not in use.

The next park I went to a couple of days later is the Chickamauga National Military Park. K-0716. This park lies in two states, so today I opted to activate the Tennessee side of the park. This location is easy to access as it is literally on the side of the road. This is why I like this location and hate it at the same time. The location is called Eagles Nest and is part of the military park completely within the park boundary.

K-0716 presents me with a quandary. This “shack” position makes for a comfortable operating position but the road noise is really bad due to the proximity to the road… I have used headphones here before and that seems like the correct thing to do if I operate here much more. I am going to go ahead and get my repeat offender for activating this park. I am already half way to this award anyway so why not? Ha Ha… Another thing that surprises me is that there are some fairly large trucks to travel up this narrow and winding road to the top of the mountain. Like large d4livery trucks kind of large, I guess it is normal, but it just kind of caught me off guard to see such large trucks going by while I was there.

The radial situation is unique here too, since it is on the shoulder of the road, I have to put both radials on the same side of the truck. Whenever I do this, I always get out the nanoVNA to see what this has done to the SWR plot. As usual, it did affect it but not by much. I was surprised to see that on 15 meters it needed both radials to get a decent SWR before I was happy. So I get it setup, spot myself, start a log in HAMRS and start calling CQ. I finally net a couple of contacts on 15 meters, but there are not many hunters even though the band was open. It did have some fading, but it was fairly strong anyway and could easily support use, but people were not there. So I moved down to 17 meters. Once on 17 meters the RBN (Reverse Beacon Network) picked me up and showed the strongest signal report I have ever seen for one of my activations. 42dB is insane! I have never seen that and this was with 15 watts no less. So people MUST be on this band, right? Well no, it seems that all the people on HF were down on 20 meters having a grand old time without the few of us up on 17 meters. I added 4 more QSOs to the log with one being KJ7DT who followed me down the bands working me on all three on this day. To me this is awesome as it shows the propagation for all three bands was really good as he is in Idaho which is almost 1800 miles from me.

So I finally decide to join in on the fun on 20 meters and QSY down with what seemed like the rest of planet earth and secured the activation in short order. Getting Paul - KJ7DT a third time on this day and Keith WI0S twice! Both of these calls have appeared in my log on numerous occasions. These are some very prolific hunters and I just want to thank them for being there to hunt like they do. They are what make activating parks fun. With 13 calls in the log I officially had the activation so I packed up as it was getting close to lunch and the road noise made it very hard to hear as well and headed into Chattanooga to go have lunch with the girls.

The clip board has made a huge difference in operating ease for me. I can now not worry about the wind turning the pages and it gives me a hard surface to work from no matter where I am. This alone helps a ton. As seen here, I am able to lay the keyer and the key on it as well as log. If you still paper log this is a very handy addition to the POTA kit in my book. Yes, I still paper log. I have had too many computers where they crash unexpectant and you have to reboot the machine and wait for it to get back up and running to trust it with my only log of an activation. The paper notebook gives me a durable backup to my phone logbook that I run at the same time.

Side note about how I log… I will run HAMRS in parallel to my paper logs and if the activation is going kinda slow, I can log both at once and keep the electronic log caught up in real time. This is a recent thing brought on by me wanting to not have to set aside time at home just to transcribe the log so I can submit it online. I found that a lot of my activations are slow enough to permit time to log the QSOs while I work the activation and not have to do it at home. So if things speed up and I cant log both the paper and electronic, then I always default to paper and the battery never goes dead in paper logs nor does the app crash… Then when things slow down, I will let the keyer send CQs and I will catch up the electronic log while I am calling so I don’t waste that time just sitting there waiting on an answer. This works really well and I can normally email the log from the park before I leave so when I get home I can simply upload them to the POTA site since it wont let me upload from my phone yet…

Here is something else that a lot of people that don’t do field ops have no idea about. A carrier with a bunch of backup equipment is a must. Everything in this bag has been used on an activation in the last few months in one way or the other. Notice there is power cords and spare coax and three pens are visible on the side, this is something that you quickly learn, things break, pens dry out, you run out of paper, all of this is things you have to prepare for before going to the park and the only way you learn this is from doing it. I can preach to the ends of time but until you have to end your activation because your coax connector came off or the center conductor broke on the coax or your antenna mount breaks, you wont prepare for it as a contingency. That is just how it is…Another really handy tool to have is a Leatherman multitool of some kind, brand isn’t important, what matters is that you have one, I don’t know how many times I have used mine to save the activation some how. Totally worth the price of admission in my book.

QSO maps are awesome, I have KJ7DT in the log on all three bands today so his one pin is actually three. Just like I have WI0S in the log twice so his pin represents two contacts. This is neat to see though as you get a visual idea of what the bands were like on this day. If I studied space weather more then I would be able to corelate the data so that it would be more meaningful, but like this it really doesn’t tell much other than skip distance for the bands I used. That is about it but it is still fun to look at them nonetheless.

So this is what it looks like to activate two parks on two different days and how the setups vary for each one based on the conditions for each location. Next time I will carry headphones for the one by the road so I can hear better. Till then, get your radio out and make some contacts with it!!!!

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

Overcast POTA activation strikes gold!

So today was a good day for POTA. I did some small work related items, grabbed the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and headed to Cloudland to get an activation in before lunch. Before I even setup on frequency I was dial-ing around on 17 meters to check the band and found G3VBS calling CQ with no takers! So I figure, why not see if he can hear me… turns out 20 watts was plenty to make a contact with England and we had a great chat for quite a few minutes with only a little QSB.

Today I setup at the frisbee golf course parking area as it is the highest part of the park as well as the quietest RF wise. The lower lot has a nicer view but with the proximity to the campground and so many more people in general, it tends to be noisy comparatively.

Something else I like about the upper lot is I can either deploy the setup in the photo above or I can string a wire in a tree as well. Rigging the hamsticks in the lower lot is more difficult to say the least. So I was a little worried about the impending rain that was on the radar, I normally use the setup you see as I can sit in the truck and operate even in the rain. This is really nice as even inclement weather cant stop my POTA activations! Haha.

Well sure enough when I got home, it started raining so I made a good call here.

I did setup on the bed cover though, which is a little exposed but I figured I could move it into the truck pretty fast should it start to rain.

Today’s radio is the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 which is a wonderful little portable HF transceiver. It is larger than the TR-35 but it also has multiple modes and has every HF band available as well. Today I started on 17 meters because… why not? And that is where I heard G3VBS. I figured I would secure the activation with ease after having a great QSO with the UK. I couldn’t have been further from the truth. I only made one more contact on 17 before giving up and moving to 20 meters. Once on 20 meters things started to pick up for me.

There were a couple of pretty strong pile ups at times and it was fairly difficult to dig out a sinlge call. Mainly because most of the stations were zero beat with me. This makes all the signals turn into one large tone and I get garbled info. Luckily, I have learned a couple of tricks around this and can work with most people now. I will simple call W? Or if I get part of a Canadian call, VE? You get the point. This is a tried and true trick of pile up runners (did I just make up a new term? LOL) around the world. When you cant make out anything, just ask for the most common prefix you know and someone will reply. It worked well for me today as I was able to break apart the pile up and get every one into the log that I could hear. I even worked 4 or 5 stations after calling QRT as they were asking and I had time. I ended up with 36 QSOs toward my day as I had one dupe so it was a great day for POTA. If you want to know more about POTA just give it a google search and head over to their website. Until later, 73 de WK4DS