Dalton Hamfest 2023 for a Ten Tec radio junkie…

Well, it is that time of year again. The Dalton Hamfest is one of our bigger local events and this year did not disappoint. Below is a Omni 6+ with matching speaker power supply (radio in the bottom of the stack) just like the one I use in my ham shack at home. This particular radio was found outside in the boneyard of all places. This is a wonderful radio that would work really well for anyone wanting to get on HF. It is especially good for CW, the receiver is just buttery smooth and wonderfully sensitive…I could go on about this radio for a long time, but suffice it to say, if your into CW and vintage radios, this one is hard to beat. It was basically the pinnacle of CW rigs in my opinion.

Aside from the usual vendors where you can get any number of new radios, antennas or other widgets associated with Amateur Radio, it has become something of a quest for me and Trey (KG4WBI) to find all of the Ten Tec gear we can find and photo document it without buying it! LOL we ALMOST came home with that Triton…(just take a gander at it below) it was in great condition and worked beautifully…

This year netted a incredible pile of photos that really impressed me when I started looking back through them. You see, while you’re walking around, you don’t notice that you have seen so many pieces of equipment until you start looking at the photos you’ve captured of them.

A prime example of this is the fact that we found two of the same kind of antenna tuner. Yet one looks like it was in a smokers ham shack and the other was not. I am pretty sure this is actually the case too as I have never known Ten Tec to do a run of gold trimmed radios or accessories.

Something that I did notice was the wide variety of Ten Tec radios that we’re at the hamfest this time, everything ranging from an old Triton and Argosy (pictured above with the matching power supply) all the way up to an Omni 7! By the way, that Omni 7 also has 6 meters… 😂 Once I added the Collins filters to my Omni 7 it is one of my favorite radios of all time. It works surprisingly well with just the stock filter but the selectivity just gets unreal with the additional 500hz and 300hz mechanical filters made by Collins.

One particular radio of interest that I have always been intrigued by, but have never really thought about buying is the Ten Tec Scout. This radio is unique in that it is a small, portable radio with a fairly powerful transmitter. I think it is 50 watts of transmitter power and to change bands, you replace the cartridge on the front of the radio with a different band module. This allows the radio to remain fairly small and still cover all the HF bands. This is a really forward thinking idea and Ten Tec is renowned for this. The Jupiter radio is a perfect example of their forward thinking, it laid the ground work for the whole Flex line of radios.

To have a whole set of these band modules is fairly hard to do and this gentleman, at the ham fest, had all of them except for one. He was missing the 30 meter module only from what I could see. This was a really impressive kit that he had and it was also in a nice pelican case and the price was really reasonable. This would make for a really awesome POTA rig or even a field day rig.

I guess it just proves that there is more out there available than you think when you just start adding it all up. Since I was just casually snapping cell phone photos as we walked around the ham first, I never really look at the camera roll until we were leaving, and that is when I realise we had seen so many different radios by just this one manufacturer, who is actually out of business at this point. There were even more radios from the typical Icom, Yeasu and Kenwood factions that were everywhere. There was plenty of equipment to choose from is my point.

It was nice to see that someone could still most likely find an obscure, vintage radio that they had been looking for, pretty easily, and to be honest there was a ton of Drake, Hammarlund and Collins radios as well. (That Drake TR7 really had me… I love the color scheme they chose especially well)

I have to give an honorable mention to another radio that is near to me that I have yet to own, and that is the Elecraft K2. There was a 10 watt version of this radio also for sale that day, and I was very VERY tempted to take it home with me…

But explaining to Teresa, why I brought another radio home was not something that I was looking forward to doing, so I left it sitting on the table and maybe cried a little…dont tell anyone… haha.

All was not lost though, as we did bring a radio home between the two of us. It turned out that Trey acquired a 2m Ten Tec HT that has been made out of pure hens teeth. He is actually working towards getting it operational again. He put it on a bench power supply and it did power up but it needs a few little things repaired on it. Currently it does not have a battery but he is looking for a battery to rebuild to put back on it. So if you know of someone that has a battery, even if it is trashed, please let me know as we can rebuild it, as long as it is complete.

Going to a hamfest for me, is more about community than equipment these days. I did grab a few ham stick antennas for my QRP radios when I do POTA activations, but other than that I did not get anything substantial at all. What I did most of the time instead was chat with friends, (whom all I had seen the night before at the club meeting LOL) and made a few more while at the tables talking about the really cool radios we found.

All in all, we had a great time today and if you have never been to a ham fest, I recommend you go to one just to see the spectacle of it. The bigger the better. Until next time, get your radio out!!!

72

de WK4DS

POTA that turns out really good for QRP radio!

Well, today was an unusual day, so lets set the stage… First we go to church and when we get home, there really isn’t much to do so I decide to run over to my local park and get an activation in during the afternoon. This turns out to be the beginning of an adventure for the next few hours that almost DIDN’T happen!

My N6ARA Tiny Paddle got some use today.

You see it all started at home when I was testing a power cord for my TR-35 radio. I wanted to add a cord to the POTA tote that I was assembling and I found one that looked like a good candidate. So I get the radio out and plug it into my shack power supply to see if the QRP rig would power up properly and it did. It worked perfectly. So then I put the cord in the kit as a permeant addition to the POTA tote. Once this test was complete I got my N6ARA paddle out of the other bag and added it to the kit and then I was off to the park.

There was at least twenty groups on the course this big! So many people were there playing disc golf!

When I arrived at the park, I was in for a surprise! The parking lot was almost full of cars! This parking lot is normally reserved for me and me alone! LOL! I am used to seeing maybe 6 cars on one end of the lot where the beginning of the disc golf course is located but that is all! There were disc golfers everywhere for some sort of tournament. I was worried I would not be able to setup, but as lady luck was on my side, I found a good spot and got the antenna in place.

This is where things take a turn for the worse. I get the antenna setup and hop in the truck to layout the radio gear and find I forgot the actual radio. I had all the support equipment but no radio. It seems when I tested the power cord that I failed to put the actual radio in the POTA tote… I felt totally defeated to be honest and almost just broke it down and was about to give up. So I thought I would call the wife to see if she would help out and she agreed to meet me half way in Trenton and bring it to me. So I laid the antenna assembly on the ground and ran down to Trenton to grab the radio, hoping all along that no one would bother the antenna laying in the grass beside the parking lot.

This saved the activation to be quite honest about it. It added about 15 minutes or so to the time table to drive down to Trenton and back and fortunately, no one bothered the antenna (seems my worries about disc golfers being curious were unfounded) and I was able to get on the air after all.

This is when I found the next problem… There was some sort of contest this weekend on CW that I was unaware of and the band was super crowded. I was starting to think I couldn’t find an open frequency when I landed on 14.068 mhz and no one was there! At least no one was near enough to me for me to hear them… So I waited a few minutes and listen and nothing. I call QRL a couple of times and then get going. This is noted by the “on air” start time and the actual time I started making contacts. I normally don’t wait a full ten minutes, but this time is was probably 6 or 7 minutes and then it took a few calls to get QSOs coming in… I do other admin stuff while I am listening as well, such as getting my POTA spot on the website and positioning my gear in the truck for max comfort and such.

Another reason I didn’t just move to a WARC band was that I only have a hamstick for 20 meters at this time. I plan to pick up a couple more at the Dalton Hamfest in a couple of weeks from the time of writing this blog… I hope they have some! Below you can see the “POTA tote” and my rig for the day, the Penntek TR-35. This is truly one of my favorite radios and would have been the radio I carried to Hawaii had I been able to confirm that my tuned EFHW antennas would stay in tune in varied setups due to terrain… I plan to test this once I get back from the trip, but we leave in the morning as of this writing and I didn’t have time to test the idea properly prior to leaving.

The log sheet speaks for itself. There is a number of Canadian hams this time as well as the one to Italy as well. I couldn’t believe how many calls I got in such a short time. This was an amazing activation for me and to think, I almost gave up when I failed to bring the radio… Then as fast as it started, it abruptly stopped. When the last entry was written down I called CQ probably 5 more times with no replies so I called QRT and packed up. What an afternoon!!! This just goes to show that 5 watts has the magic if you get on the right band at the right time!

So if your thinking that you wont have a good time with your radio and there is no sense in even setting up, just remember this blog post and how I even forgot the darned radio!!! So get out there and warm up that atmosphere!!!

72 de WK4DS

Activating POTA site K-5524 in central Florida in January 2023

So I am staying in Tampa Florida for a few weeks in January of 2023 and brought a couple of QRP radios with me just in case I had time to do some POTA… Well, this worked out and I did get to do a few activations.

Welcome to Chito Branch Reserve. This is a really nice place tucked into the bustling metropolis of Brandon…or more commonly known as a suburb of Tampa FL… LOL, it is a really nice little area and I was glad to see some people actually using the site for something other than a HAM getting a POTA activation. The lot next to the truck was for horse trailers, but was locked. While I was there, there were two different groups of people that showed up to use the land as well as me. One guy was going on a bird watching adventure and the other was a dad with his two sons who played with several RC machines till all the batteries were drained.

I checked all the maps I could find and from everything I was able to figure out, the parking lot is fully inside the boundaries so I was able to setup the truck-tenna and use it as my power source too.This makes setup a lot more simple as I don’t have to use the throw line and try to hang wire antennas in the trees. I also didn’t know if that was even allowed here either so I was apprehensive about doing that at first.

If you will notice in the photos of the parking area that it is really small, this comes into play a little later when the wife of the guy with his two boys, shows up for a minute. You see when I arrived there was no one there at all and deployed the antenna radials left, and right of the truck. This was not a problem until the fellow with the RC airplane, crashed it into a palm tree and could not get it loose. He ended up calling his wife to bring him a pole so he could fish the airplane out of the tree. When she arrived, she ran squarely over the radial on the other side of the truck. Fortunately, since it is in place with only a weight, it was not a problem to simply pull the wire out from under the car and repositioned it. They apologized profusely, but I told them that it was simply a piece of speaker wire, and it was not a big deal as I had already broken it a couple of times myself and laughed. He retrieved the stick, and then promptly got the airplane out of the palm tree and proceeded to fly until the battery went dead about 20 minutes later lol.

There was some sort of QRM at this site too, but it was not near as bad as the other site. The QRM was some sort of thumping that would happen every so many seconds like clockwork, it was almost like WWV, but more spaced out in time. It was also wide band as it covered the entire amateur 20 m band at once with a single pulse. It wouldn’t run up the band. It was the whole band at once so this was some sort of broad-spectrum noise, whatever it was.

This was not really a problem as I was able to turn down the RF gain about 10% and almost completely eliminated it so I didn’t have to really listen to it all that much. What is it with Florida and these band noise issues that I do not have back home on top of lookout mountain? Lol

I just love the look of the Spanish moss in the trees down here, it has this “ancient” kind of look to it…

Having the cigarette lighter adapter and a Anderson power pole on the end of the cord is a godsend for a QRP POTA operation. The power port in the truck is rated for 15 amps and the cord I bought has a 10 amp fuse in it, so there is no danger of problems there as none of my QRP rigs pull more than 5 amps max. I also had enough cord to reach all the way to the bed cover of the truck so I was able to set up outside and not have to sit inside the truck to do my operation. The weather being as nice as it was I wanted to do that instead. In the photo below you can see the common mode choke I made out of a toroid to keep RF noise out of the radio, I am going to test this to see how much attenuation it produces with my nanoVNA at some point…

I got some new calls in my log since I am 500 miles from home, I have a new areas to call into, like Tennessee and North Carolina!!! Also, I looked, and this is my fourth state! To activate a new state for me is a pretty big deal as I do not travel by vehicle to the states outside of my local area very often. Woo hoo! 46 to go! ha ha ha! Honestly, I do not ever expect to get all 50 states in the log as activating, but it is fun to get a new one when I can.

The operating position for this day. Today I used my ICOM IC705 transceiver and my little travel paddles from a previous blog post, and my headphones that I normally use on the TR35 transceiver. I normally do not use headphones with the 705, but today it was windy and there was a lot of car noise as cars would go by on the highway just a few meters away. Wearing headphones almost completely eliminated this noisy environment and made it easy to copy CW.

This is the bucket of extra stuff I brought in case of problems and it has helped a lot on this trip already. I threw this container of random stuff in the truck before I left, as I wanted to make sure that I did not have a project like an activation get shut down over something as mundane as a cable failing. Also, do not laugh at the small, cheapo multimeter. It works and I was able to do several little simple, troubleshooting type things with it and it also is very small, light weight and compact. Sometimes the simple little cheapie ones work great for what you need them for… Another perk to the cheap multimeter is that if I drop and break it or do something to it in the field and it gets destroyed or someone carries it off or any number of terrible fates, I am only out a few bucks and it doesn’t hurt me as bad as the nice Fluke brand meters I have at home.

38 QSOs in the log is a pretty good day for me, Especially since one is from across the Atlantic ocean!!! MM5DWW was booming into my location and when I looked him up on QRZ, I saw why. This man has an antenna farm to die for, nice kit OM, hope to work you again soon! I am thankful to the Lord that nothing went wrong and that I had wonderful weather too. If you enjoyed this blog post, I would appreciate a like, and if you would share it to your friends, so that I can grow this page.

Thank you, and 72 until next time. WK4DS

Winter Field Day K4SOD Style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you Josh!

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

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

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

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

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

Trouble activating K-1878 Hillsborough River State Park in Florida!

I ran into some problems with the area I was in but worked through them and even grabbed a photo of some local wildlife. So let’s get started…

Finally!!! I GOT MY FOURTH STATE!!! Lol. We had went to Tampa Florida for a few weeks to escape the winter in North Georgia and so I grabbed a couple of radios for some POTA fun.

First, a little about the park. This park was easy to get to and it is a big loop through the wilderness area with pull offs as you go around. There are hiking trails, camping areas as well as playgrounds and other facilities on site. They even have a small outfitters store in the center of the park. All of the parking spaces are pull in angled from the road as you see in the photos throughout the entire park except for the very first one where there is a small visitor area with a historical reference section.

The park is beautiful, and basically shows you what a wild Florida would look like if it was not covered in houses and strip malls. The park does require a fee to access it and you pay when you pull into the entrance.

There is a guard shack and they collect the fee there. I had several park employees travel by my setup while I was operating and no one gave it a second look. I believe this is because my set up is very low impact as the radials are held in place by weights, and the antenna is actually connected to my truck and freestanding.

This parking created a small challenge for me as I tend to need to back into the spaces so that I can deploy my antenna ground system. My solution to this problem was to drive around the Park until I found a section of the parking lot that was vacant of cars. Once I found a vacant parking lot, I could pretty much choose where I wanted to put my truck, so I put it in the furthest corner from any infrastructure which typically lends itself to not ever being in anyone’s way.

As a sidenote, once I had finished my activation, I realized that there was a observer watching from a nearby tree. I am pretty certain this is a red shouldered hawk and it’s very beautiful. There were several of them in the park and I happened to see this one fly down and catch something small on the ground and then flew up to this tree branch in a nearby small tree, where he sat (or she I’m not sure which) until I was able to get my camera and walk over there and take a photo of it.

Onto the Amateur Radio portion of this adventure. Once I found a spot to get out of the way, and that was far from any structures that I could find, I parked in the corner of the parking lot, deployed my antenna system and got out my ICOM IC-705 radio. This is where the trouble began, I learned quickly that there was some sort of interference that was washing over the entire CW portion of the 20 m band. I did not even bother to check the other bands as the only antenna I deployed today was a 20m hamstick.

I jokingly considered it to be similar to the “Russian woodpecker” of days of yore as it sounded like that every few kC. I am pretty sure it is the radar installation at the Zephyrhills municipal Airport as I was in the direct flight path to the runway. My antenna being a vertically oriented radial, is a very noisy antenna anyway so I am leaning towards this deduction to the problem. I have heard RF hash from other devices, and none of them have ever sounded like this. It literally sounded like a woodpecker.

Combine that with the fact that I was only 7 miles distant from the airport. I also had aircraft going overhead occasionally as well. This is what clued me in that the airport was somewhere nearby, and that I was in the flight path, I kept hearing airplanes lol.

I tried a couple of different things to see if the problem would go away and figured out really quick that it was not with my system, and that I could only work with what was there. I even turned down the RF gain in an attempt to hide the noise from me, but that didn’t really help since I would be transmitting sometimes on top of this noise, and that would make people not able to hear me calling CQ. What I wound up doing was looking for a section of the band between the noise spots and setting up in those areas. I finally found a couple near the QRP calling frequency and started calling CQ.

This worked really well as I was able to quickly get 20 QSOs in the log in about 30 minutes. I even got a few of the guys, that I normally get back in Georgia, in the log as well, such as K9IS for instance.

The set up today consisted of the 20m hamstick with radials piped into the truck to the 705 direct with no tuner. The power from the truck powering the radio out of the cigarette lighter port and I was using my little portable travel key that I bought off eBay and that was it, very simple.

So, I guess the moral of the story is don’t give up, even if you have something like the Russian woodpecker beating down your receiver. Just find a spot that is as clear as you can get it and try from there, you never know what you will find.

Thanks and 72

WK4DS

How well do compromise antennas actually work?

Well, they work really good…for what they are.

3 DEC 2022 TenTec Argonaut 5 @ 5watts CW into the 20 meter Hamstick.

To expound on this simple statement, I have been using a 20 meter hamstick for a while now and making charts of my contacts to see how well they work by looking at the direction, distance, and minimum range of these little non-descript antennas. I keep a fairly detainles logbook too and I part of that log is RST information as well.

All of this information has been collected using QRP transmitter power of 5 watts or less to see how the other station can hear me and how many of those stations I can contact as well. To be honest, I was shocked at how good this little antenna works. It is fairly quiet (when you are not near man-made noise) and I can hear CW signals surprisingly well even on the tiny little Penntek TR-35 radio.

To get an idea of what you can do, just take a look at some of my recent AAR blogposts like Monte Sano State Park for instance. That one was done with the Penntek TR-35 and the 20 meter hamstick as well. Actually all of these recent activations have been with the lowly hamstick so far since it has gotten cold or rainy.

10 DEC POTA Activation map 20 meter hamstick and 5 watts of CW output in 30 minutes.

The above image shows what I was able to do with 5 watts and the 20 meter hamstick on a day when there was not quite so many amateurs on the air that could hear me either. I will check on some other hams and they will have tons of pile up activity and when I call CQ, it is quite different most of the time. I can occasionally get a small pile up going with just 5 watts, but I am not skilled at managing a pile up so I end up still working just about 1 per minute or maybe a little more than that. So I normally run about 1 per minute on a good day for the entirety of my activation and normally I don’t activate over 2 hours max, most of the time it is 1 hour or maybe a little less, so the maps wont be quite so buried, but they do show the effectiveness of the antenna anyway. The first QSO that day was to Puerto Rico and the longest was to California. Not bad for 5 watts and a tiny antenna!

I was going to try to come up with some sort of scientific way to measure the long range effectiveness but in the end, there just ins’t any way to do it. The only thing I have is this little map and that is a pretty good representation. You see if it is to be scientific, there has to be a control and there has to be non-subjective measurements and the test has to be repeatable. This last one is the real problem, the atmosphere changes constantly, this is why we have QSB,,, So we cant reproduce the test exactly with a different antenna since when we test the second one, it will have different atmospheric conditions. We can try, but there is no real way of knowing if the two antennas got tested with the same conditions… so it really is pointless to compare them to other antennas.

So to summarize… A hamstick antenna is a type of portable antenna commonly used by amateur radio operators. It consists of a flexible metal rod, or "stick," that is mounted on a base and can be easily taken down and transported.

The metal stick of the hamstick antenna is actually a type of coil called a loading coil. This coil is designed to resonate at a specific frequency, which is determined by the length of the coil and the type of wire used. When the hamstick antenna is connected to a radio transmitter or receiver, the radio's electrical signals are sent through the loading coil, which converts the signals into radio waves that can be transmitted or received.

One of the advantages of a hamstick antenna is that it is easy to set up and take down. It can be mounted on a car or other vehicle, or it can be placed on a tripod or other base. This makes it a popular choice for portable operation, such as field day events or emergency communication.

Another advantage of the hamstick antenna is that it is relatively inexpensive and requires minimal maintenance. It is a simple yet effective way to get on the air and make contacts with other amateur radio operators.

Overall, a hamstick antenna is a convenient and cost-effective way for amateur radio operators to communicate on the airwaves. It is a popular choice for portable operation and can be easily set up and taken down as needed.

So grab your hamstick and take to the airwaves and make some contacts!!!

David

WK4DS

72

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now for the Argonaut 5 Radio Fan…

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

Old fan measured right at the back of the radio.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

72

David

WK4DS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

72

WK4DS

David

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

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

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

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

QRP Watt Meter

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

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

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

Simplifying antenna tuning with a manual tuner and a nano VNA on location.

Please note: This is not an instructional presentation on how to use the nanoVNA to tune your antenna, but rather a simple primer on how I deploy mine in the field and why. There are tons of videos on YouTube that will show you how to deploy the VNA in a tuning operation and at some point I will probably do that here, but I wanted to share the idea of USING the VNA to tune the antenna WITH the antenna tuner prior to hitting the transmit key and protecting your radio transmitter finals. With that out of the way, let’s dig in!

Something I have always hated doing is the whole tuning operation and transmitting while I did it. Just screams of poor operating practices to me for some reason. I know it is needed though, so I do it… Till now. You see, some radios don’t have an internal antenna tuner built into them, like my TenTec Argonaut 5. This radio is a joy to use but you either need resonant antennas or a tuner to match the radio to the radiator.

Enter the nano VNA (Vector Network Analyzer)… I found out about these little devices from my friends Aaron and Roger and finally got one for myself. Back in the day, about 15 years ago, these little pocketable widgets would set you back about 20,000$ and were the size of a suitcase! Now, technology has caught up and these things are very affordable (about 50$ US) and are even battery powered so you can take them to the field easily.

nano VNA Vector Network Analyser Kit I built for field ops

I built this kit for mine with a divider box of adapters (far left in picture), then the nanoVNA is the black device next to that, then the large bin is for cables and such and lastly I have a stylus as it is easier for me to use that than to use the guitar pick looking device that comes with it. This one is recovered from a old Samsung Galaxy Note. I got the case at the Huntsville Hamfest from GigaParts if you want one of them, they probably have them on their website, but I am not sure…

This thing can do all sorts of measurements, but the most often used by me is antenna tuning. If you want to know more about what it can be used for, just search YouTube for nanoVNA and you will get an idea.

In this photo you can see a lot of data being presented on the nanoVNA, such as the frequency range I am testing, two different measurements, one on a smith chart and one on a linear line chart of SWR versus frequency. What the smith chart shows me is a graphical representation of whether the load (antenna) is capacitive or inductive, and what the impendence is at the selected frequency as well. The line graph shows SWR plotted versus frequency and this allows me to maximize the tune for a particular frequency visually, all without risking damage to my radio amplifier section from mismatched impedances or high SWR. The nanoVNA does have a signal generator in it so it is technically transmitting, but it is VERY low energy.

Manual tuners in the past, such as this vintage MFJ 941 worked really well, but are slow and you only get information for the exact frequency you are tuning at (which usually is not the frequency that you are going to use as you dont want to tune up on top of the person calling CQ). This meant long periods of on air transmitting a carrier tone while adjusting the controls on the tuner to add capacitance or inductance to the the antenna to match as best you can so as not to damage the radio.

Radios like this old Ten Tec Argonaut 5 do not have automatic internal antenna tuners in them and even a lot of newer radios don’t have these tuners in them to be honest. These radios either need a tuned antenna that has been built for specific frequencies or a tuner to match the non-resonant antenna to the radio. The nanoVNA allows the operator to tune easily and this happens much faster than on air tuning. Tuning this way also protects the radio in the process. What I really like is that I can see if the bandwidth of good matching SWR to the radio so I know immediately that I can tune the VFO around and not have to retune the antenna while I am on one certain band. Some antennas and some bands don’t play well together and you can see this too… graphically. This allows you to know that on those particular bands, you will need to tune when you leave the safe zone of swr. It is so much more powerful to tune your antenna with this little device.

This is the setup I use to be able to easily connect the nanoVNA to the antenna while out on location. The radio comes equipped with SO239 connectors so the antenna has to be screwed on to the radio with a coax cable normally. The modification I made, to make this process super fast, is to add a PL 259 to male BNC adapter. Then I add a SMA to BNC to the nanoVNA and now I can simply and quickly remove the coax from the radio and connect it to the VNA for analysis.

I also made a simple note page to get me close when i go from one band to the other. This way the time to get back to a tight tune is even faster. I also made some notes about how many radials and such. I keep these notes in the case with the radio and tuner.

This has been my biggest blog to date and I really liked writing this one for you. If you have any questions, just drop them in the comments below and we will try to get you an answer as soon as possible. If you think tuning your antenna like this is a good idea, you can find these on Amazon with a simple search. Also, they really are inexpensive. You can also get all of the adapters or accessories on amazon as well. It is all there, all the training you will need can easily be found on YouTube as well, plus some… Now go get on the air!

72

David

WK4DS