My new travel CW key failed on its third POTA outing...

This key was supposed to be my solution to poor performing keys…well, today I was 16 QSOs into a POTA activation and the little key suddenly started “ditting” nonstop. I power down the rig, take a look at the key and find the “dit” lever is pushed over against the contact arm on the key.

In this photo you can see the “dit” lever shifted to the center.

As you can see below, somehow the lever is off center and not returning anymore. so I shut down the op and packed up to go home and see what happened. I needed to do some other chores as well so I made the decision to take the key home to where I had a better assortment of tools to be able to repair it…if possible.

Once home I took the key down to my workshop and removed the cover assembly to reveal how the key is made. I found a ultra simple design that is efficient and minimalist in nature. This also makes for a clean layout and an easy to trouble shoot system. The lever arms dont have any springs of any kind, but rather the lever arms have been thinned just ahead of the mounting block enough to allow them to flex easily over to the contact arm. Simple and elegant.

Below I am pointing out the contact that is shorted. The key is upside down here, but you can see the contact pad touching the center column. This doesn’t make sense as the arm is not broken nor is anything seemingly out of alignment.. The key worked perfectly up till this point too, so I looked very closely for a crack in the arm, but it isn’t broken at all, in fact it looks perfect.

What I found upon closer inspection is these screws I am pointing out below are in oversized holes drilled in the block. It appears this is done on purpose to allow for centering of the lever arms in the housing once assembled. Simply loosen these two screw and turn the block till both levers are equally spaced from the center contact arm, then retighten the screws and your good to go.

Here is my conclusion. I must have bumped the end of the lever I am pointing at in the photo below, as this is the only way to shift the block off it’s axis. By hitting the end of the paddle arm I could feasibly transfer enough energy to the block to shift it. By just pushing the levers in the normal travel directions it cant do that as the frame has hard stops in place to prevent it from over travailing. So at some point I shifted my key in my hand or bumped it into something in the truck to cause this failure. In other words, I did something to it, I really don’t know what I did, but I must have hit it on something. I works perfectly now as I took it to the QTH and got on the air with it this evening and worked several POTA contacts and I plan to redeploy it on the next outing. Time will tell if I am too rough handed or if this key will become my defacto travel key.

So if you get one of the CQ Gemini keys, just keep in mind that it is a great key and wonderful to use, just be sure to protect the end of the paddle arms from bumping into stuff and it will work for a long time. When stored, this is a non-issue as the paddle is completely inside of the metal housing and cant run into anything. I can still recommend this key for a travel key, I just learned something about it today that I wanted to share with all of ya’ll.

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72

David

WK4DS

Ham Radio Activation for POTA at Park K-2169

Well today started out like any other day… hahaha I always wanted to start a story like that…Anyway…

So this day did start out like any other day actually, but it would turn out to be a very different ending. I had a few hours to be able to activate a park and decided to grab my bag and head over to K-2169 for an activation. I had planned on staying a few hours and maybe doing as many bands as I could. When I got to the park they were running an excavator near my usual spot, so I went to the top of the hill where my other good location is and found them mowing the grass with riding lawnmowers!!! ha ha. Figuring that the excavator was quieter than lawnmowers I went back to the first location and started setting up my station. It was at this point that I realized that I might not get an activation today,

The yellow line approximated the radiator and the two blue lines are the counterpoises. This is a 65’ EFHW wire antenna.

You see the pop-up storm clouds had started to roll in and thunder was in the distance. This normally doesn’t happen till later in the afternoon but just for me, the clouds made an exception I guess. I was halfway through setting up the antenna when I started hearing thunder in the far southern edges of the sky. Upon receiving this valuable information I hurriedly finished getting the antenna into the tree with a decent elevation, got my radio out and quickly got on the air.

Once again the Lord was on my side and I had good propagation while I was operating my station. There has been a strong solar storm recently and the bands have been in the trashcan so to speak. Taking a quick look at my log shows the band fading in and out slowly over the hour or so I operated today.

Signal reports as bad as 339 and 229 were common at the beginning. at the end the signal reports were more like 599 & 579 regularly with strong signals coming in from far away states.

Today I used my Icom IC-705 with the automatic tuner and hurriedly assembled the system so I could get the activation as quickly as possible. I had even planned out my escape had the rain started to fall while I was operating. I set up my station so that all I had to do was disconnect the long wire antenna from the tuner and could literally put everything in the backpack (kinda like a bucket of sorts) and just carry it all over to the pavilion to get out of the weather. I had planned, that once the rain had passed, I could go and collect my antenna or hook back up the station and finish the activation should I just need a few more contacts to get my ten.

A closer look at the custom knobs I made for my AH-705 tuner as the wing nut on the ground stud is terribly slow and the red plastic knob now lives somewhere inside the inner fender well of my truck… I happen to be a machinist so this was a simple task for me.

Turns out, I did not need to worry about any of that, I had 25 QSOs in short order before the storm clouds really got close to me. The clouds were up overhead by the time I had broke down my station, that was not a problem though since I was already packed and ready to head to the truck. All in all it was a good activation even though I was constantly worried about the impending storm rolling in from the south. I guess the moral to the story is don’t give up just because the weatherman said it is going to rain, we all know how accurate they are!! ha ha.

Looking through the trees towards the front heading my way, and thus cutting my activation short today…

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Thank you and 73

de WK4DS

QSL Mail call !!!

What have we here? Looks like a letter from the Azores!!! I don’t know why, but I have always enjoyed receiving these letters in the mail, and it brings me a little bit of joy to get them. Every time I see one of these, I get excited, no matter how long I have done this. This is why I still have QSL cards that I send out from time to time as well. The clue that it’s a QSL card is the Amateur Radio call signs on the envelope and typically the foreign postage is another clue as I normally do not write letters to people overseas.

Look at that antenna! No wonder he could hear me with my little paltry 5 watts of transmitter power. Normally, the stations that are overseas that actually will respond to my CQs when I do a POTA activation, are using antennas like this, or something similar and very high-quality receivers because I am transmitting into a compromise antenna with just five watts or maybe even less sometimes.

It never fails to amaze me how economically this postcard can be transported from one location on the globe to another for just a buck or two that astounds me due to the economy involved in moving this piece of paper.

Thanks for tagging along this morning while I drink my cup of coffee and read my cool letter from the Azores and until next time get your radio out and go make some contacts with it.

If you enjoy reading my blogs, please lock them and leave comments and share it around and all the usual things that makes my webpage more successful that would really be appreciate it and thank you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Elecraft K1 goes out for a POTA activation!

So I finally got my Elecraft K1 out of mothballs and took it for a spin to K-2169 the other day. (I actually have already used it once before but had put it back in favor of the IC-705 as it has more widgets and such.. Anyway, I finally just bit the bullet and took it with me to my favorite shady location at K-2169 and setup for some “on air” fun.

The one thing I like about the K1 is that it has an internal antenna tuner installed. This simplifies the set up and breakdown of the radio at the location by eliminating the entire external antenna tuner connection series of events.

I am running two 10’ counter poises at this time, mainly because I have them and it seems to help to have both connected. I want to run my VNA over them to see what it looks like with one and then two at some point.

This one simple thing alone saves me an easy five minutes of set up time. So it was fun for that fact alone but the other things that make the K-1 unique are that it is such a simple radio to operate as well. I like that the VFO works really well and the radio has enough controls to do everything you need while on an activation and nothing more.

Another thing that I like about the K-1 is that the headphone jack is wired for stereo headphones from the factory. This seems like a trivial thing but with the 705 and the TR 35 they are both factory wired for mono headphones or one ear only listening. This is not what I enjoy using therefore I either have to buy a adapter or figure out some kind of bizarre wiring scheme to get both ears to have signal on those two radios, but on the K1 just works.

I keep my K-1 in the original aluminum briefcase that I have had for over 20 years now. The radio and accessories have fit nicely in it for all of this time. I do carry the 705 backpack kit when I activate with it because the EFHW antenna that I am using is in that bag. Rather than pull stuff from one bag and put it in another I just take both and pull what I need from each one. I do like you using the N6ARA paddle that I have with my 705. It works really really well and I am probably going to get a second one for a spare when I wear this one out.

Yes, I did make that key you see in there. It is made from scrap industrial materials and works exceedingly well to be as simple as it is. I love making some of the things that I use on the air and my keys are one area where I do that. At some point I want to build a radio from scratch, but I have no time right now to dedicate to a project of this magnitude, so I will just stick to the simple stuff and have fun on the air.

Getting back to the activation I was kind of in a hurry that day so I hurriedly threw my throw line over the first large tree branch to get my EFHW in the air and it took me four attempts to get it over that branch which is normally a quick one throw shot for me! ha ha… There goes the whole doing it in a hurry part. Once I got it over that first tree limb then it’s a simple matter of pulling the antenna over that limb re-tying the throw-weight and throwing it into the second tree to pull the final end of the antenna up where this photo shows.

This makes the antenna run about 60° north east when I string it like this but it seems to work really well from this position.

It is no secret that the bands have been terrible lately but I was still able to get 23 contacts in about an hour, maybe a little bit longer, with this activation. This particular activation put me at 19 activations at K2169. I really wanted the Repeat Offender award so I went back the next morning and setup the entire assembly the next day and reworked 14 more contacts to have my 20th activation at Cloudland Canyon State Park. I have been working on this award for quite some time and finally got to the minimum 20 to complete it. Now I think I will start branching out to other nearby parks and activate some of those as well. I will still go to Cloudland Canyon very regularly as it is really close to my home and I can go over there almost any morning for an activation. It is the only park that is within a 30 minute drive of my house that I have available to me. The area I live in is park dense, to a degree, but they are actually spread out somewhat due to the topography of the area.

I am going to wrap up this blog post by saying that if you have not tried parks on the air I would recommend it highly. As well as if you have not tried Morse code, I would recommend that as well. Mainly because both of those are very fun for me… Until next time.

POTA Website

72

David

WK4DS

How high does your antenna need to be?

So over the past few days I have been thinking about how high does my antenna actually need to be. Turns out it doesn’t have to be very high at all. I have done two park activations in two days time and on both days I never raised the antennas any more than 9 feet off the ground. That’s right! 9 feet max! Almost had them running dead horizontal from the picnic table 65 feet away from me. No throwing the hoist line multiple times to get it in a good spot or even having to throw it at all actually, I just tied it off to a limb that I tossed the end of the line over without even adding the throw weight to it!!! Easy peasy!!!

A quick look at the QSO maps for these two outings shows that the radiation pattern is typical for a low altitude wire antenna. Pretty much omni-directional or a “globe” shaped pattern. Also these tests were done on days that had pretty bad solar activity and the bands were in terrible shape. I think this is why there is not near as many western stations as compared to other activations. Also note the signal reports on the logs and that they were not really bad when the bands would open as I was strictly running 5 watts QRP power also.

The low position creates a very obvious take off angle as the contacts on this outing are almost in a perfect circle around me!!!

So all in all, I would say that if you want to be on the air for a while, go to the trouble of getting the antenna as high as possible. On the other hand, if you want to get a quick activation in on your lunch break or if your doing a RADAR run of some such, it seems that getting the wire up off the ground a couple of feet works good enough to get an activation in less than an hour. I am going to repeat this test in the fall with literally laying the radiator on the ground and I will take my VNA and see what it looks like in all three positions. This helped me to understand that it really doesn’t seem to matter if you cant get your antenna up high enough for proper directional effects.

The end insulator is only about a foot above my hand here and is even under a tree!!!

I strung my antenna almost horizontally from the picnic table on two different park activations at two different parks to see if I would get more or less contacts with a really low antenna and the results are in. Seems that if you cant get your antenna really high up (for the lower bands) that is seems not to matter if it is 20’ high or 3 feet about the hard deck. My logs for the two activations look like any other day when I stress over getting the wire up high into a tree. The only real benefit from getting the wire up really high is it prevents others from tripping over it by not noticing it. This was my only real concern while activating both parks, although I did go at times when I knew that there would be fewer people and at Booker T Washington state park I was literally the only person in the area I was in. I just didn’t want problems during my experiment, so I chose times that would protect park users and my gear and preventing the gear from being a trip hazard as well.

If you don’t have coffee, is it even a legit activation???

The signal reports were cyclic as the band would open and close, but all in all, I was getting good reports even though I was running 5 watts through a tuner as well. I like doing these kinds of experiments as it allows me to see just how bad the setup can get and it will still work… lol. All kidding aside, this worked way better than I thought it would and setup was FAST. I really liked that part about it.

Thanks for reading along, I hope you enjoyed it and if you did, please hit the like button and dont hesitate to leave a comment too. I love comments!!!

72

David - WK4DS

Huntsville Hamfest 2022 AAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mighty Orion 2 contesting rig even made an appearance!

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

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

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

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

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

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

I even found the youtubers. Lol.

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

72

David - WK4DS

High Temp Activation

Today I went to my favorite park and set up my IC705 radio to work an activation on Park K – 2169. The only difference today that was unusual was the fact that it was in the mid-90s here in Georgia, this usually is not a big deal but when I finally got my radio set up I was in the direct sun. This causes the radio to heat up very quickly and I found myself with a radio that was so hot that I could almost not touch the case in less than 30 minutes. So I moved the radio to inside my backpack to where I could shield it from the Sun as the shade moved closer and closer to my operating position. Eventually the shade got to the end of the table and I was able to get the radio out of the Sun. For the period of time that I was working 17 m I learned that the reverse beacon network was not picking up my CQs and the POTA site was not posting my spots either. These two items combined caused a very long and “quiet” period of 17m operation… HaHa. I finally got 11 contacts on 17 m after considerable time of what seemed like endless calling of CQ. I had my antenna strung high in the tree, probably 25 or 30 feet up, ran up over a large limb on the first tree and horizontally at a slight upward slope to another tree as shown in the graphic I made from the photo I captured. I am still using the N6ARA tiny paddle for my travel key and it works wonderfully to this day. I have done well over 15 activations with this key now and it keeps on working perfectly. Once I moved to the 20 m band the game kind of picked up for me as I was able to make another 24 or so contacts in short order. This being mostly due to the RBN starting to see me and I was able to get the POTA spot to take when I moved to 20. The band would fade in and out some as I was working but for the most part I was able to work contacts about one per minute. It seems like that is the maximum speed that I am able to work a Morse code contacts with the speed I am able to operate (about 20WPM) and with the exchange information I choose to send. All in all, it was a wonderful day to get out and play with my radio and to get an activation in at the same time. My next activation will either be with a Ten Tec Argonaut 5 or my PENNTEK TR–35 radio as I want to try one of those out for an activation soon. I have had the TR-35 for a while now and have only used it a couple of times in the shack at home so far. This is a travesty as it is a wonderful little radio. I hope to take it on trips in the future as it is SO small!!!

If you have not checked out the parks on the air, set up an account with them and look at what they are doing. It is a wonderful program and has lots of activity for the amateur operator. There is usually a mode that is something that you would enjoy doing, that will have people on the air almost all the time. Whether you are into digital, CW, voice, or any other mode that people use on the air there is usually something going on with POTA. I even had two traditional QSO contacts today during my activation, complete with name exchanges, QTH exchanges, and even our rig exchanges. So there is no hard and fast rule as to what information is traded in an exchange but they do normally have a minimum of signal report and usually the hunter will send the state they are residing in (but it isnt required from what I can tell), that is about it, anything else is fair game. If you want to know more about it you can go to the Parks on the Air website to learn lots more about it.

Thank you and 73

Parks On The Air Website

WK4DS-David

I started with keeping the battery in the pack but eventually had to also put the radio in it to keep them both out of the direct sun.

ICOM AH-705 Antenna Tuner with my homebrew cable I made for it that has power, coax and control cable all in one bundle.

Antenna ran into the trees with the counterpoises run along the ground underneath them.

The IC-705 is a wonderful little radio that works really well for portable operations.

Not a bad day running 10 watts into an EFHW wire antenna!

10 things to do during the terrible band conditions with amateur radio

Now before we go too far into this blog post you need to know this is satire. I thought that this would be a fun diversion from the frustrations associated with the bands currently in 2022. So if you came to this blog post to get legit tips on operating during poor band conditions then this is probably not the blog post for you. With that out of the way, let’s have some fun.

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Let’s get the easy ones out of the way first. Like…

Install a 180’ tower and a 20/40 beam antenna. We all know that a better antenna is the first step to better signal, so why not start there? I mean, isnt this what second mortgages are for?

Locate a 5 kilowatt amp… You will have countless hours of fun running a high current rated 220VAC circuit for it. It could easily double as a coffee table in the corner of the shack or as a nice space heater in the winter months to keep your cat warm.

Beacon mode. Now here is a novel idea. Your radio could be running in beacon mode, calling CQ fruitlessly anyway, and you could be free from sitting at the operating position and could instead do something less valuable… like go mow the yard…or better yet, scope out where you are going to put that tower.

Straighten up the wiring in your shack. Lord knows we could all use some wire management in our lives. So what we all need to do is turn off our perfectly functioning radios and then go around behind them and start messing with all the wiring, I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Marriage counseling. We are all edgy lately due to the terrible propagation and the frustration with trying to complete QSOs that are normally easy, Instead of getting mad, why not instead take the XYL on a date to her favorite restaurant? You could even take her shopping…I know, I know…that might be too much, but you could try???

Repeaters. Now hear me out, if the bands are this bad, shouldn’t we reconsider what “DX” really is? How about we start working some local DX since it seems that 50 watts on 2 meters can still open a repeater these days.

Alternative QSOs. You can still goto a ham fest and make “eyeball” QSOs with people, don’t forget your QSL cards too, people still like to exchange them. Do these go in the LOTW too???

QRP Radio. We all know how frustrating QRP can be even in the best of band conditions. Since many of us are accustomed to having 100 watts or more at our disposal to make contacts with, why not try using LESS power during these terrible times??? I mean, you could just get it over with up front and not have to wonder why you cant make contact, you know for a fact what the problem is and you have an easy scapegoat?

Kit building. Now is the perfect time to get one of those kits and spend some quality time cussing at the burned fingers from the surface mount devices and heat sensitive ICs that you have to solder…

Read a blog. I think this is a great idea to be honest. You can subscribe to this very blog with a button somewhere on this page and then you will get all the notifications when I publish the next one. Honestly though, take some time to just call CQ if you want, maybe, just maybe someone will answer you…

Thank you for going down this rabbit hole with me for a few minutes to read this little blog, I just had this idea and thought I would share it with you guys and gals and have some fun with it. Leave a comment with what you think should be on this list that I left off. I would love to hear what all of yall think.

73

David

WK4DS

Straying from 20 meters…

In the course of the most ham radio operators career on the air they will find that they spend a lot of their time on the 20 meter band. This is because 20 meters is a very good band for propagation and is almost always open to communications. The problem with a band that is open like 20 meters is that every amateur radio operator that has a HF radio is on 20 m, well at least it seems like that is what is happening…

Another thing about me is that, I really am not into contesting either. This means that the 20 meter band is not available to me on the weekends as there is pretty much a contest every weekend…and for good reason! Contesting is a very popular activity in amateur radio around the world. Although for me, I just am not super into it.

The WARC bands do not get used in contesting so on the weekends I find myself dialing around 17 and 30 meters alot.

The N6ARA Tiny Paddle has really started to grow on me, I like the size and how well is just plain works. it is effortless to send good code with this key. I can highly recommend these is you want a small light weight key for things like SOTA and POTA.

Another thing I like about the WARC (World Amateur Radio Conference) bands is that the 30 meter band is reserved for data modes only. Did I mention my favorite mode is CW and wouldn’t you know it, the powers that be consider morse code a data mode… So I can goto the low end of 30 meters and almost always find someone to chat with. That is something to remember too, the WARC bands are pretty narrow and many modes share them, so sticking to the gentleman’s agreement on where your mode normally operates will go a long way towards being efficient with these small band allocations and making sure we all have room for our modes.

The rig setup is really a lot simpler than this photo makes it look. I wanted to get an overview photo of the whole thing for once to show the relationship of the parts. This rig would look like this if it were on 80 meters or 12 though so this photo isn’t strictly about the WARC bands…

A lot of people do not use the WARC bands very much as they are not the conventional ham bands. I tend to enjoy using these bands as they are normally quieter and less crowded than the conventional bands. Another benefit is that the POTA program also uses these bands as it is not a contest oriented program other than award chasing like any other awards system (Think ARRL W.A.S. or something similar).

On the day that I decided to activate on the 12 meter band I was looking to confirm that it was open to communication and decided to check the 10 meter band to see if it was open. I did this because I couldn’t hear any stations other than someone operating FT8 and had no idea how far away they were. This is a common practice as normally if a higher band has propagation, then the lower one will as well. I found that the 10 meter band had beacons coming into my location in the state of Georgia from California with clear audio and this gave me the confidence I needed to try and activate a park on the 12 m band.

As you can see from the logbook I did get a successful activation on 12 m and it was a lot of fun. There were periods when I did not get a call back from my CQs but, for the most part, they came in fairly steady for the whole time I pursued the activation. This just goes to show that you can get an activation on something other than 20 m if you want to and it also gets the radio warm doing something other than the usual.

Get out there and get on the air.

73

David

WK4DS

Long lost friends in amateur radio

I have been doing POTA (Parks on the Air) for a couple of months now and have started to notice a few call signs that show up in my log more often than not. One of thsee calls is K9IS. Steven has “hunted” me at almost all of my activations, to the point that I now know his name when he calls me. His call sign just kind of “jumps” off the page at me for some reason. I dont know why this happens but it does occasionally. Maybe this time there was another reason???

Here is the dejavu part of the story. I was talking to my buddy across town (KG4WBI) on the repeater one night and we got to talking about the contact I made to Alaska from my jeep on a RCI Ranger 2950 10 meter radio using CW and I wanted to know the output power I was using that day, (Trust me this all ties together at the end) So I remember that I had used that particular QSL card in my WAS card set for my Alaska card, so I dig out the box and start going through the stack to find the Alaska card and what do I stumble across? A QSL CARD FROM K9IS FROM WHEN I HAD MY OLD CALLSIGN OF KG4WBH!!! Seems that day I was playing with my Rockmite 40 I had built and he was using a Ten Tec Argonaut 5. I just recently bought an Argonaut 5 and plan on doing some activations with it using a straight key soon. (Like next week if I can get the cable built). Anyway, this blew my mind that we had made contact so long ago and now we are meeting on the air reguarly to make POTA contacts and we didnt even know it.

I was using a Rockmite 40 that day and it only uses about 500milliwatts of output power, hence the QRPp note.

I reached out to Steven and shared my little discovery with him and we both had a good laugh out of it. Neither one of us had remembered the QSO back in 2003 on April Fool’s day…till I found that card. This is one of the many reasons I like using paper QSL cards. It is fun to me to wax nostalgic and read back through these cards at times. Especially the ones with additional inserts sent with them that had background info about the operator or some cool little tidbit about the local area where they lived. It is a treasure trove of information. You should look into using paper QSL cards if you have not done it before. It isnt for everyone, but at least take a look. If you want to send just select cards on occasion, you can even make simple cards in photoshop for a specific event and just print photos of them, that has worked for me in the past more than once. I even used the discount version of Photoshop… GIMP. Anyway, let’s climb out of that rabbit hole and get back to the original story. HAHA

This is why I like paper QSL cards.

PS: By the way, the output power to Alaska that day from a modified 102” stainless steel whip mounted on the back corner of my jeep was just 8 watts. The bands were good to me that day.

PSS: If you noticed, my old callsign and my buddies call sign are sequential. We did this on purpose as we wanted to try to have sequential calls when we decided to get our licenses. I have since acquired a vanity call after getting my Amateur Extra ticket, but Roger still has his original call even though he now has his General.

ARRL Amateur Radio Field Day 2022 After Action Report from a CW op.

Well that fateful day has come and went, fun was had, radios were used and new skills were learned.

I want to thank Ms. Dana K4GCA, for hosting us on her property so graciously, this made the whole event feel so much better. You see, this is our first field day without her late husband Brian (K4GC) who passed away unexpectedly last year. We miss Brian dearly and it made this field day even more special to be allowed to operate the site from his back yard.

This was the first year I have been to a field day event in many years. A lot of new faces have came onto the scene since the last time I did field day with the K4SOD amateur radio club. It was good to see old faces as well as the new ones and to put faces to call signs is always a good thing.

Roger KG4WBI brought several radios and antennas and proceeded to build a huge antenna array on a push-up pole to connect his Ten Tec Argonaut to via hamstick dipoles. I had to leave before the system was built completely and go to church for the evening but when I came back I went back over to the site to operate some CW on the air..

Once things got underway, they setup the SSB station in the back workshop and got to work. Ricky W4EMA getting on the air here on Roger’s KG4WBI Alinco DX77T HF rig while Steve KI4WJG waits his turn at the controls. Thanks to KK4IJR Kevin for many of the photos in this article, but somehow we didnt get a single image of him!!! LOL

It is strange how CW will draw a crowd I did not think most people enjoyed it but it was a huge conversation topic the whole time I was trying to work contacts. The guys were truly interested and it surprised me. I was looking around trying to find contacts with the Argonaut but since it only has 5W of output power it was very difficult to get through the band QRM and make a contact. I spent the better part of almost an hour trying to make five contacts, it was very different from the parks on the air style of operating.

I finally gave in and we used Josh’s KN4RTY Yeasu 891 to up the power output and to get through and make some contacts. At this point my confidence was boosted somewhat and I was able to get back on the Argonaut and it’s five watts of output power and make a few more contacts with it before I called it quits at 2:48 in the morning local time(5:48 UTC).

Getting to use the Argonaut was a special treat as those radios have been out of production for many years maybe even decades at this point. Roger had went to the trouble of having this radio professionally tuned, aligned and cleaned so that it would be in pristine operating condition for the night. Ten Tec transceivers are amazing radios especially for the CW operators. They seem to specialize in that type of radio communications with their transceivers. If you really enjoy using CW in my opinion, you really should look at Ten Tec and Elecraft radios, these radios excel at that mode. Now don’t get me wrong, all amateur radios, pretty much, work really well with CW. It is just a subset of all the amateur radio operating modes so don’t think you have to have a certain brand of radio to use CW, I just prefer Ten Tec radios.

I decided to take two different CW keys with me to the field a side. One was my straight key I made some 20 years ago but since we were using it on the Argonaut 2 I had to change the cable to an RCA cable to be able to connect it to the radio. The other key was my serial number 1 “prototype” WK4DS paddle and I love this key greatly so I put it in a waterproof hard shell storage box with some closed cell phone to protect it during travel. These two CW keys are my primary keys that I use when I work outdoors or sometimes indoor operations. I have others as well, but these are my favorites.

My logbook is a mess! I would get the call first then get their exchange info before even calling them, this way i could listen to the exchange and just confirm what I had written down already. This made code copy at such high speeds much easier for me. You see, I am kinda slow at copy right now… lol…

It was a really good time and I really enjoyed meeting with people that I had not seen in a long time it makes me realize how great this community really is. If you have not gotten out and interacted with the local hams in your area I highly recommend it. Until next time get your radio out and go make a contact with it will see you later 73 WK4DS