Winter Field Day 2024

It’s that time again. Winter Field Day is just as big of an event for the Dade County Amateur Radio Group as regular Field Day is in June.

We have used the New Home Community Center for a long time now and I want to thank Kevin for his efforts to keep it open for us. Here he is telling everyone something interesting while I take a selfie.

This year it was really warm on the Saturday of the event due to some sort of weather system that had moved in so it was really foggy at times (see the photo of my antenna on the truck below) and rainy at times, but I would rather have this over the cold. Well, that was Saturday, Sunday showed up with the AC on high as it was 43 in the AM and wet from the rain and the temp dropped continuously over the day as well. Not cool…errrr, I mean ….not fun!

Another thing about these events is that there is always something good to eat nearby!

Below we have several people setting up antennas and just being around for photos and such that were having a great time! I missed a couple of people somehow, so I hope they dont mind not being included in the blog…like W4EMA, I really dont know how I missed getting his photo, I kept having to walk past him… figures.

Roger KG4WBI (above) stopped by to visit even though he was still getting over the crud. He is always a wealth of knowledge about all sorts of things.

Below is Todd KK4YLF with his beautiful station he setup. This machine had a touch screen and all sorts of other tricks up it’s sleeve to allow it to work really well. It was impressive to see it setup for a field day site to say the least.

Alright Hollis, what is going on here? Lol. You look WAY to comfortable. LOL…

Below Josh is working some HF SSB on his FT891 into an EFHW and it worked well. How well? I’ll get to that in a little bit. There were stations setup everywhere this time.

Above is a photo of the display on the sBitx where we was using FT8 (yes, I now know this is not an allowed mode for winter field day…now, I guess I should read the rules more carefully first) and making contact with ZD7Z. This was a particular exciting QSO for us as we had randomly just hopped on 15 meters since no one else was up that high on their radios and he was the only station on the air up there. So we figured why not try to get a QSO? He actually heard us! We were blown away at this as we had a small radio on a wire antenna (Josh’s EFHW that I mentioned earlier) with expedient rigging and it still worked. We played around for a while and made several contacts on FT8 after that and could hear many more in other areas…and on a different band. Seems there was some sort of contest happening somewhere else at the same time and I mixed that up at times. Live and learn.

When I arrived, I just threw the radio together on the bed cover as the rain had stopped and wanted to play with it some so I made something like 20 FT8 contacts on it before I shut it down for the afternoon with many being in Europe as well as North America. It was a great day and this blog post didnt have quite as much dialog in it as usual, but there were a lot more photos this time so there is that. I hope you have a great day and till next time, 73.

Addendum: I have one more photo to share. Kevin got a photo of me as well as Ricky and Josh so W4EMA is now in the blog! Thanks Kevin, for the photo!

A quite soggy activation of sorts

I had a couple of hours today so I went to K-2169 to setup in the truck since it was… a little rainy.

These kinds of conditions are the exact reason I build the “trucktenna” mount for my truck. If I had not done this back last year, I would not have went to a park today and made over 40 contacts. Plain and simple. As you can see I did do some expedient temporary water proofing with some electrical tape, this will do the job for a couple of hours, but make not mistake, this stuff wont keep water out for the long term and should not be a permanent solution. It will get you by at a POTA park though.

I ran out three radials again today as I had plenty of time and wanted the SWR as low as possible since I knew I wanted to attempt FT8 for a while today once I finished my CW section of my activation. I like this location too as it is out of the way of other cars, there is no need to walk behind my truck in the spot so no worries about people getting into the radials, and I can run the radials out as far as I want without and problems at all. I also opted to run the coax through the top of the door where there is no sharp change in direction with the door seal and door jamb, this allows me to keep the window rolled up and rain out of the truck cab better.

There is something about a vintage pickup truck that is just plain cool to me… yeah, this truck is legit 18 years old at this point. Hard to believe that it is that old to be honest, sometimes…

In the above photo I have a picture of a another truck in the parking lot (the black blob on the right side of the photo) that belongs to a couple of frisbee golfers that we out playing a round when I took this photo. That is one dedicate group of people if you ask me…lol. I would not have left the house today with this kind of weather looming over head. I thought it was a funny image with the rain coming down almost sideways and their truck was a little blur across the parking lot from all the water on the windshield.

I shared the above image of the radio to show how the fan is setup and that it even works when the radio sits like this since it is in a armored shell fitted to it. The fan would cycle during the FT8 session a good bit, probably coming on toward the end of each transmission after about 3 minutes of transmitting at 25 watts of output power. It also gets the radio out of the way of the armrest so that I can log easier too. It also puts the screen at an angle that is easier to read as well as manipulate since it is also a touch screen to control the radio and I don’t use the mouse and keyboard in the field, just the touch screen.

In the below photo you can see the radio working WD5BFH for a QSO. This in itself is of no real importance to the story, but I grabbed this image to share a unique trait of the sBitx radio. That is, it will ignore some call signs and will not let me click on them to complete a QSO for any reason. The call W7PK called me several times and you can see many of them in this photo, but I could not accept his call at all. I tired numerous times to select him for a QSO and it would not do it. To test this function, I chose other calls and those worked fine. I don’t know why either is the main problem. I have some homework on this part to figure out, this is not the first time I have ran into this problem on this radio, but it is pretty infrequent. It will just chose someone for some unknown reason and not let them talk to me on this radio using FT8…

You can also see the top of the logbook page also in this photo and this is how I setup the screen when running FT8, it allows me to see the completed and logged QSOs while it is working a new one and I have time to write down the last one and put it into HAMRS for my ADIF file. This is why I like to run FT8 at the beginning (while I am getting my logbook ready in HAMRS and my spot on POTA) and the end of the activations, it allows me time to do housekeeping while I am also able to make some contacts on a different mode as well. I really like that.

I had trouble at the beginning of the activation getting connections on FT8, and that is why I hopped over to CW after only 3 contacts. Sometimes one mode doesn’t work and the other does… it is kind of the luck of the draw. As you can see the CW section showed up in great number.

All in all, it was a good time and I made over 40 contacts today, which is a good day for me. I really like it on days like today as I really couldn’t do much else today, other than work on projects in the machine shop… It was really the perfect POTA outing in my book.

Broken antennas and a quick activation at K-2169 is what ham radio is all about!

I started today’s activation at the Sitton’s Gulch parking area. This is a quick access location for me as it is only about 15 minutes from my house to this spot.

First thing I had to do before the activation though was make a new center conductor for my hamstick mount. Since I made the truck mount out of thicker flat bar stainless steel in the machine shop, it didn’t occur to me that the antenna adapter is going to be too short. Well, it was and I ended up stripping out the last 2 threads on the stud because that was all that was holding it together. Problem here was that I couldn’t reuse it like it was, enter the machine shop at this point.

Below shows the arbor press pushing out the center conductor from the mount itself. This turned out to be a fairly straight forward affair as well, which was nice.

Once out of the arbor press, I was able to examine it more closely. It is a simple part so I decided to make a new one out of bar stock. I dug around in a couple of bins and came up with some brass bar stock and set it up in the lathe and proceeded to cut out a new center stud that was the right size for my needs…

Here we have the new part coming out of the bar and all the unneeded parts (chips) flying off at high speed! Lol. I love machining brass, it is such a joy to work with compared to stainless steel or titanium… Since the stud is press fitted into the body I really had to watch a couple of the dimensions to make sure they would fit properly, but several were pretty loose and were really not critical so I was able to get this part cut out in about an hour total, which for me isn’t too bad.

The solution was to make a new stud that is .200” longer thus allowing for the thickness of my mount. I simply replicated the same measurements, other than the length of the threads, and pressed it back into the housing and now I have an antenna mount with the correct amount of threads for my particular application. I also did one other thing too, I hand fitted the threads to the coupler that screws onto it, this gives me the best possible thread fit between these two part as well as the strongest fit as well. Since I know this is the only place these two devices will ever be together I don’t think it will turn out to be a problem later should there be some need to use it with another setup.

With it repaired and installed on the riser frame, I can now get back on the air and stay warm in the truck too!

Something of note in the below photo is that I use the nanoVNA to check my antenna every time I setup now (or as often as possible as long as I have it with me and it is charged up). I have found some odd stuff a couple of times too because of it. This is how I found the broken coax center conductor a while back as well as some band Sta-kon connectors on my radials a couple of times.

I will even use it between band changes just to see what the SWR is going to be like in a certain band location now. It is a really handy little tool. I highly recommend you picking one of these up and learning a little about it at some point, they are fairly inexpensive compared to the antenna analyzers and will give you the same information plus some. It just takes a little time with YouTube and some patience…

Once the antenna was deployed, I got back in the truck and powered up the radio to see if there was anything going on and boy was there! In this photo I am working FT8 on 15meters and as you can see the band was not very active with FT8 operators (you can see it on the waterfall). No one answered me, probably because they couldn’t hear me very well compared to other ops, and after a while I decided to see if there was any CW contacts on 15. After several minutes of calling CQ, I had netted just two contacts. These two showed how good 15 meters is for distance though with both of them being a great distance away from my park. So sometimes the band just isnt there for you to make contacts even if the RBN says it is.

All that aside, I started on 20 meters as it is my goto band if I dont have a lot of time. If you have been reading my blog posts for a while, you will know this, so here I am on 20 meters and I decide to start on CW this time and see what I can find. I get my spot on the POTA site and off we go, it didnt take long to secure the activation and then some and once I had cleared the little pile up I had going I decided to hop on FT8 to see what I could do. FT8 went really well there to with me netting 14 QSOs there as well before I decided to move up to 15 meters. What I really like about FT8 is that it is pretty hands off, this allowed me to fill out me log on HAMRS and get it caught up to the most recent QSO before I finished out this mode and changed bands. That is really cool in my book.

Now that I have the wiring in the doors repaired I am able to route the antenna coax though the window the easy way as long as it isn’t raining… This is really fast and doesn’t pinch the coax like running it through the door jamb does when I operate in the rain. You really don’t know how convenient this is till you don’t have access to a feature like windows that roll down… It is almost comical how long I put off repairing the wiring in the two back doors and to be honest, it really wasnt that hard either…live and learn.

In the above screenshot you can see that there was plenty of signal but there just wasn’t many CW ops on the band. I did get one Canadian and Paul up in Idaho before going QRT though. I was happy to get at least a couple of contacts once I setup on the band. It is always interesting to see what the range of a band is when the higher bands are open. I have gotten some pretty long distance stuff with some really bad antennas on 10, 12 and 15 meters in the past. It just takes going up to those bands and looking around and the right time of day for it to work…the band has to be open too, but we all know that at this point…lol.

Today’s key was the Gemini Ham Radio travel key, This little key is great for me as it is the perfect size for my hand and I really like how it collapses into the housing for travel. When you take it apart, you see how simple the design is and that you don’t have to have this super complex device to send good code. This thing really is pretty simple and it works great.

Below shows the radial field I laid out today and this was just to give it something to work with as they are all on the same side of the truck! I used one of my tuned 20 meter radials and the set of 17 meter radials and this gave me great SWR on 15 and 20 meters. I like it when this works out… Of course, since I am using a ham stick, the truck body is part of the ground plane and the radials interact with it so the SWR will depend on where I put the radials. This is why I always attempt to put them at right angles to the mount if at all possible as this is how I tuned them initially and also allows me to adjust SWR somewhat by simply moving them around behind the truck.

This is also a first for me as my log shows almost as many FT8 contacts as CW contacts. (14) FT8 contacts and (19) CW contacts is a good day when you only have an hour and a half or so to operate. I have never been one to try to get hundreds of contacts in one outing, even though it has happened a couple of times, I am more about just getting on the air and having some fun. So at some point I hope to work you on one of my POTA trips!

73

WK4DS

Tallulah Gorge K-2202 AAR

Activating Tallulah Gorge K-2202 AAR with photos!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WK4DS

Activated Cold Mtn K-6895 TWICE

Here is the AAR for two separate activations over a two day period at the same park. This is Cold Mountain State Gameland near Waynesville NC. K-6895. It is a great place to do some vehicle mounted POTA and I recommend it.

In this photo above you can see the entrance to the parking lot and how small this area is. I also ran out a single radial on the first trip as I was only going to be on 20 meters as this park doesn’t have cell coverage. I also didn’t know how well I would be able to do with this park as I did literally zero scouting before hand. I scheduled the activation as I wasn’t sure about cell service and this turned out to be a good thing.

I have learned to search out parking lots that are fully within the park boundaries. I do this by pulling the park up on a couple of map applications and then zooming in on the roads around them and scouring these areas for parking lots. Just like in these two screen shots I found the park boundaries pass over Lake Logan road a few times and upon closer inspection, I found what I was searching for… A parking lot within the park boundaries that I can operate out of the truck with is a luxury that I love to land on if at all possible. I didn’t take a man portable rig this time as I wasn’t thinking about POTA being the main reason for this trip but rather something to do if the weather got bad or I just got a hankering for some radio time (which is what happened)…

The radio for today was the sBitx v2 and I am learning more and more about it as I use it. The message memory is really nice with this machine. I really like the whole process of operating CW with this radio and FT8 as well. It is almost effortless. The dev that wrote the code for this radio is working on a v3 release… I guess is the version. I am not sure what version we are on at this point to be honest, but it does have a couple of issues that make it less fun to use at times, but to be honest about it I have had a blast with this radio.

Day 1 was nice because there wasnt anyone except a fly fisherman who was down in the river. Here you can see the radial ran out to the side.

Since I had come to this park and didnt know much about it other than it was a game reserve, it was nice to see that amateur radio wasn’t on the prohibited list of activities. Lol. Keep those activations low key and it probably won’t get added too.

Things got dark in a hurry since it was overcast as well. I ended up finishing the activation by flashlight. Here is a photography trick for you. Dont point the light directly at the thing you are using (here it is the logbook) but point it at the ceiling and the light will bounce back and fill the area making it easier to see and work.

Day 2…

The next day showed more fishermen than the previous day but still there was plenty of room to put out some wire radials. Today I wanted to get on 30 meters and see what I could do as the band was open… or so I thought. So I put out the radials for 30 meters and since they would reach the trees, I ran then horizontal from the antenna mount to see how they would perform as elevated radials. Turns out that was a terrible idea, the SWR was horrendous so I started playing with them a little. I next just laid them in the grass to do it the lazy way and the SWR still wasnt great, better but still fairly high. Lastly, I put down a stake and pulled just one wire taught and BAM 1:1 SWR! Seriously, that was all I had to do???

So I also scheduled this activation as well, but unbeknownst to me, I failed to convert local time to UTC time so the schedule was way off. So I was running dark mode. I called CQ on 30 meters and in ten minutes or so had made a whopping 2 contacts. At one poi t someone tunes up on top of me and starts calling cq as well! Lol. So I figured I would switch over to FT8 and see if the time was still synced well enough for it to work. Ten minutes into this I had successfully made two more QSOs for the log.

At this point I switch antennas and get on 20 meters CW and start calling CQ. I actually think at this point that the spot was working and there just wasnt anyone on 30 meters as I started getting QSOs in the log like normal but then it just fell off again and I decided to try 20meters FT8 and see what would happen and again I only made a couple of QSOs. Not sure why but it is what it is. I am happy at this point as I have the activation in the bag but still have a ton of time so I go back to 30 meters and the waterfall is covered up in activity. I am stoked! I setup and strt calling CQ… and I call…and I call and FINALLY I get an answer.

Over the next 12 minutes or so I work 3 contacts withthe band covered in activity. So I simply ask W4ELP if he would spot me and he said he would. Thank you Ed for the spot because you can see what one simple little thing loke a spot on the POTA website can do for an activation. QSO #19 is Ed and in about 35 minutes had made 19 contacts. This is awesome considering the lack of a spot on the network. As you can see, having the spot though got the word out and I quickly added another 36 QSOs to the log with a couple coming with nice little pile ups.

I learned a valuable lesson today in the I need to check the time on my scheduled activation carefully so it happens at the time I am there. Lol. The next one did happen right. Just like the Smokey Mtn National Park one. The RBN works great and scheduled activations making not having internet access a moot point. This is a fairly new practice for me so I plan to use it more in the future.

All in all I had a great trip to Cold Mountain and will probably go back the next time I go to Maggie Valley to photograph the elk heard since it is so close to the motel. Thanks for coming along and I hope to work you soon!

WK4DS

73

Something special finally happened to me at a POTA park...

Today had been a pretty busy one at work, so afterwards I wanted to go over to K-2169 (Cloudland Canyon State Park) and just work some contacts to take my mind off things and to just relax for a while since it was 77 degrees on November 7th!

I get my sBitx V2 and head over there with the plan to run my hamsticks since I only have about 2 hours, maybe less, to get my activation in before dark. I roll up to the frisbee golf parking lot and notice another car in the lot with an antenna on the roof…a very large antenna mind you when compared to the ones you usually see on top of smaller cars.

I go ahead and park in my usual location and decide to walk over to see if there is someone in the car and THERE WAS! What do you know, I found another ham already doing POTA! It was none other than KB4QXI (John Law) and he was working SSB with a 20 meter hamstick on the roof of his car none the less. It only took me a year and a half and over 120 activations at this one park to finally run into another ham radio operator doing POTA. John had a pretty sweet system setup in his car with a computer, I assume for logging as I failed to ask him if that is what it was for, but I am pretty sure it is. He was also running a Yaesu radio of some sort on a mount that placed it right in hand’s reach but out of the way of the passenger seat, which happened to be where the computer was residing. I failed to get a photo of any of that so just let your minds run amuck with the verbal description and we will move on.

After talking with John for a while we agreed that it would be best if I setup in the next parking area down the hill which is right at 2/10s of a mile away. I personally figured that was far enough that we shouldn’t have problems with cross talk if I went to 30 meters since I was going to be operating with CW anyway since he was already on 20 meters when I arrived. I figured that if 30 meters was really bad that I could just drop down to 40 instead and work all the locals. Lol. Something else I had not noticed was that this lot had powerlines running right over it (as you can see in the above photo). I figured at this point I might as well give it a shot anyway and see if I could get the activation at the minimum. I did only have about 2 hours till the end of the UTC day at this point.

I setup three counter poise wires, you can see one of them in the photo I took above just barely because I forgot to get a closer photo prior to it getting dark… soooo. Suffice it to say, I ran out the two 30 meter tuned radials and even had the opportunity to run them elevated about 5 or 6 feet above grade, which is probably why my radio worked so well on 30 tonight to the point I didn’t move off that band. Tuned radials seem to work SO much better than radials that are just close. The key when I operate from the truck seat can vary between the Gemini and the N3ZN paddle, it just depends on the mood I am in as well as how fast I want to setup as the Gemini is in the carry tote and the paddle is in the hard case with the Argonaut 5… I normally choose my paddle based solely on things like this as I really like using them all.

After talking to some of the more code savvy hams in the email reflector on the bitx group and them helping me solve the code problem (actually they solved it and told me how to implement it), I was able to get the FT8 mode operational. It actually worked when you called CQ already and it had an issue operating when you would answer someone else calling CQ. It is a stop gap fix that does allow it to work but it doesnt work as efficiently as it should. Still it got FT8 working for me so I am stoked!

To be fair, this is Ashhar’s first iteration of this mode in his hand coded software he wrote and it does work so I got no complaints as it allows me to work the mode WITHOUT the need of an additional computer. He is currently testing a revision that works even better so I am excited to see what happens with that. In the photo above you can see the exchanges and the log entry for my QSO with K4SQL. This is all in the radio too!

On the way out, it was pitch black as it now gets dark at 5:30…uggg. Have I mentioned how much I dislike Daylight “Savings” Time? Well, I dont like it… This is a prime reason too. Even without DST being implemented, it would be dark at 8PM in November. Regardless, I had to use a flash light to break down my antenna tonight.

I powered down and quit before the UTC day flipped over as that would have forced me to stay two more hours to get a second activation in…lol. I do need one more activation at this park to get me over 4000 QSOs. I never planned on getting that many QSOs at one park to be honest, my only goal to start off with was to get 20 activations so I could get the repeat offender award, now I am well north of 120 activations and almost 4000 QSOs! By the time this blog post goes live, I should be past that mark.

Something else of note is that I am currently still logging my FT8 QSOs on my paper log and typing them into HAMRS as there isnt that many of them at this point and I can easily keep up with this quantity manually instead of learning how to export them from the radio and then add them to my HAMRS log electronically or even a new logging program of some sort instead. There will be a point when I will have to do that, but for now I can still get them in the log like this really easily. So till next time warm up the air waves with your radio and hopefully I will work you from a park!

73

WK4DS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

North Chickamauga Creek WMA K-3958

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the native layout at startup.

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

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

73

WK4DS

sBitx V2 Amateur Transceiver Mods for POTA Use

My newest radio, the HF Signals sBitx v2, is an HF radio with so many features that you just need to follow this link over to their website to see what it is capable of. Once you have finished going down that rabbit hole, come back over here to see what mods I have done to mine already for my POTA stuff. I want to say this right away, this radio is kind of in Beta, so if you don’t like to open up the radio and tinker with it in both the software as well as the hardware, this probably isn’t the radio for you. With that out of the way, let’s get started!

I decided to get in on this idea of a open source architecture radio design. I found this company, HFSignals, and they make several radios with their latest model being the sBitx V2. This is a touch screen radio with a huge screen and it is powered by a Raspberry Pi SBC. Using a legit computer to power the radio unlocks so many things that this radio can do that other radios can not do. For one, it will do FT8 IN THE RADIO! Yeah, no external computer needed at all, that in itself is a gamechanger and don’t be surprised if you see the big names in the industry doing this in the near future because of it. By using a Raspberry Pi SBC for the brains, this little machine is just chocked full of goodies that those other radios cant do.

FT8 is native inside the radio on the sBitx v2.

You heard that right, as I type this blog post it is on the bench next to me finishing a QSO with I1RJP, and when it does it will automatically put the QSO in my log for me. How awesome is that? Did I mention it is open source? Yeah, both the software AND the hardware are open source and it is encouraged to take your radio apart and tinker with it. Shoot, it even shipped to me with a spare set of output transistors in the accessory bag. These are well thought out but they are still rather simple overall designs with features like they are passively cooled radios and use a crystal filter network. Another thing about being passively cooled is that it means there is no fan noise to deal with at all this way, since there are no fans.

Well… I used it on a POTA activation and the little radio got HOT. Really hot to be honest. So I decided that since this radio is designed from the outset to be open source and to be tinkered with by the end user and I wanted to use it for POTA activations, that I would add some fans to cool the little machine on activations.

The first thing I wanted to tackle was the power amplifier heat sink. It is a great heat sink and does a wonderful job as it became really hot during the activation. I first started looking for a suitable fan in my junk box and found the perfect fan in an old computer power supply that I have cut apart for another project. The fan was still mounted in the sheet metal case which also happened to fit perfectly over the outer edges of the heatsink. All I needed to do was trim the sides down so it sat next to the heatsink and add some screw holes to attach it with.

Once I had it mounted with a couple of self threading screws, it was time to get it running. I went inside the radio and started looking for a suitable place to tap power out to it and found the incoming source point was the best, but the fan would run all the time if I used this spot…

Enter a simple electronic circuit that could be used for any temperature of fan control and could even be adjustable with a potentiometer if you were so inclined. This circuit is a simple power transistor rated for 6 amps of max draw (I used this so it could handle the 300mA of draw from the fan and not need a heat sink and they are still really cheap too). You simple have a voltage divider network for the base of the transistor where you have a fixed resistance between the base and ground and you add a thermistor (a temperature reactive resistor) between the voltage source and the base.

I chose a 10K ohm negative coefficient thermistor for my needs as this design has the resistance go down as the temperature goes up. The fan is simply wired in series with the transistor’s collector and the voltage source and the transistor is basically used as a electronic relay in the simplest form. I know the MOSFETS are more efficient, but this works and I had all of these parts (except the thermistor) on hand so I used these instead.

What happens during operation is that when powered up, the thermistor has so much resistance at a lower temperature that the base voltage is less than the .7 VDC required to bias the transistor since the fixed resistance of the base to emitter side of the voltage divider is calculated for the desired temperature. The thermistors have a chart showing the resistance at different temperatures so you can make these calculations fairly easily. Mine worked out to 270 ohms for the fixed resistance between the base and emitter. So you can imagine that with 10,000 ohms (at 77 degrees) on the other half of the voltage divider you only get .363 VDC on the base of the transistor and the transistor stays “OFF”…

I found the above chart online for 10k ohm thermistors and grabbed it for reference only. This may not be the right chart for your thermistor as they have different resistance curves so check with your brand of device and make sure you have the right chart for your device. Back to the story in progress…

Well knowing this, as per the chart above when the temp rises to about 107 degrees then the resistance drops in the thermistor to about 4980 ohms and this now allows about .7 VDC to develop across the base of the transistor, forward biasing it. Notice how I made the contact with the hear sink. I soldered on a pair of wires and put heat shrink tubing on them to insulate the connections then I ran a 1/4-28 tap down into the space between two fins cutting something resembling threads into the fins. Then I took a piece of a zip tie and put it on the thermistor and ran a setscrew down against the ziptie/thermistor stack to hold the thermistor against the heat sink it works really well too. The ziptie is only there to do two things, to prevent me from cracking the outer shell of the thermistor and to insulate the thermistor from the setscrew so the setscrew wont bleed off heat, I am not certain it helps, but it sounded good in my head at the time. LOL. I located it near the transistors so it will pick up the heat faster. I also changed the mica thermal spacers out for aluminum ceramic instead as those are supposed to conduct heat significantly better between the power transistors and the heatsink.

The fan control circuit can be seen on the perf board next to it in this photo.

Then once things heat up the fan spools up and blows on the heat sink, in turn cooling it down to the point where the temperature on the thermistor drops enough to raise the resistance back up and shut off the transistor again. This worked like a charm at the last activation I used the sBitx v2 on. The fan doesn’t even come on to drain the battery until the heat sink warms up enough to need it, so if your simply listening around or hunting activators and doing search and pounce, then the fan will not cycle on very often at all… if ever. I do understand that there is some current flowing through the resistor network all the time though as well, but it is low and I am not really worried about 3mAs of current anyway. I have really large batteries in the grand scheme of things and if I am going to hike with a radio it will be the Penntek TR-35 anyway…

The next “upgrade” I did to mine was to add a heat sink and fan module to my Raspberry Pi 4 SBC (single board computer) that is the heart of the sBitx radio. The original configuration has the SBC mounted right on the RF board with very little space between the two for airflow and no room at all for a fan of any kind as you can see above in the photo with the side radio cover removed. I did some experiments with positioning fans above the heat vent opening above the Pi and could feel that the air I was pulling out was quite warm. This led me to the assumption that the SBC would run smoother (and probably last longer) if it had a proper heat sink installed on it. You see as my unit would run, with time, it would start to lag a little from information input, like adjusting the VFO would result in the numbers jumping on the display instead of a smooth change as the knob is turned. I noticed when the fan was pulling air across it that this would be reduced significantly if not eliminated. So the mission became “how do I get a fan on this thing to cool it properly”

So I start looking at adding an external fan but ultimately that didn’t look really feasible as I wanted to pull the heat off of the Pi properly and not with just slight air movement. A case fan would only help a little and I am pretty sure at this point that the SBC needs a little more help than that. Enter a riser kit from amazon and a heat sink assembly with fans from one of those Raspberry Pi bundles that comes with the pi, a small case and a heat sink with fans. I measure every thing and come up with a height to elevate the SBC and check the cabinet and sure enough, there is plenty of room to add it. So I get it all together and when you get the riser kit from amazon, you get the little screw-in standoffs as well as the header socket extender to extend the pins up to the Pi once installed. If you will look closely in the photo below, you can see one of the fans and the heat sink fins for the SBC heat sink that I added to the Raspberry Pi SBC to help cool it.

In the above photo you can see the pin extender i also had to add so the Pi would plug in once elevated for the heat sink module. This worked wonderfully for fitment and I was stoked to have the heat sink on the SBC finally, but I still had to connect the fans to power to get them to run. Instead of putting them on a heat sensor, like the power amp fan, I chose to wire these straight to the main power switch on the sBitx so that when you turn it on, they spool up and run the whole time. My reasoning is that the computer will be working the whole time as the radio is in constant “refresh” mode so to speak as the sBitx software package has to keep everything up to date in real time on the display, then there is the background applications that are also running like the telnet server and dx cluster stuff and the other applications should they be active. Logically the SBC will be running nonstop, so lets just run the fans all the time…

This is where I run into a problem…

Did you notice where I drew power to run the fans? That seems completely reasonable for someone who just successfully wired up a fan on a temperature sensing circuit for the power amplifier. Well, it turns out that the fans for a Raspberry Pi are not 13.8VDC fans but rather 5VDC fans as they are designed to be plugged into the SBC IO header bus and not driven from a 13.8 VDC source. Let me tell you something, when you run a 5 volt fan on nearly 14 volts it sounds like a jet engine preparing for take off! On top of that, I had a pair of them!

I had brought the radio to the house and connected it to power to play with it and hunt some POTA activators and the whole time I am thinking to myself… “Man, these tiny little 25mm fans sure are loud…” but after about 10 minutes (yes, they lasted that long and in fact lasted much longer) I started to smell hot plastic… I shut down the radio and took it apart to find the fans incredibly hot and seriously, “soft” to the touch.

Back to the workshop and I figured out what I had done. So I start working on a way to lower the voltage that would not cause RF hash inside the radio cabinet. Those little buck converters from amazon are notorious for causing RF hash so that was out. This simplest thing to do was to put a big resistor in series with the fans. I had put them on a 5 VDC supply in the shop and measured the current draw so it was a simple matter to do a little ohms law and come up with about 50 ohms of resistance to mitigate the excess voltage from the supply. Also these fans pull very little current and I am running them at 4 VDC instead of the full 5 volts as they are rated to run from 3.3 to 5 VDC. This way they will be a little quieter too or at least that is my thinking and it gives me a little leeway should the voltage go down lower or even a little higher.

Inside this heatshrink is (4) 200 ohm 5 watt resistors soldered in parallel so make a 50 ohm 20 watt resistor.

Well the brute force approach worked and the (4) 200 ohm, 5 watt resistors in parallel dropped the voltage down to a very workable level. The resistors dissipate about 1/2 of a watt of heat total so I put them out of the way from everything else and it works, it just works. Maybe later I will add some sort of active voltage regulator and do it so that I don’t have to just burn off the excess power nonstop to keep the fans at the right speed. Maybe something like a 555 timer biasing a mosfet for pulse width modulation to keep the power draw down and keep fan speed at a constant level. I don’t know, I will look at that later, for now, the brute force resistor idea is working just fine.

Once I got the fans turned back on, I found “I had a rod knocking” in one of the fans… figures that if you run them at almost 3 times the rated voltage that something like a bearing fails in the fan… well I just ordered another set from amazon and swapped them a couple of days later and now we are all set. So it would seem at least as when I went to reassemble the radio I found that my USB and Ethernet ports no longer lined up with the openings in the side plate for the radio.

Turns out that if you have a fully equipped machine shop, this isn’t a real problem though. It could have been solved with a good file and probably a half hour of work, but who wants to do that if you have a CNC milling machine at your disposal? So I put it in the milling machine and manually open up the exiting holes to allow use of the ports and by default I also created air vents for the Pi to get fresh air to it much easier now. This also seems to work really well for the time being. Better air flow, adding a heat sink and FANS!!! The Pi runs cool now.

I also did a couple capacitor mods that I found on YouTube as well. A fellow on the interwebs had done these same capacitor mods and they made sense to me so I went ahead and added them as well. The following video describing these mods and why.

To summarize his video, he added decoupling capacitors to the three jacks on the side of the radio to drain off stray RF. He also adds one across the incoming supply lines to kill transients and possible RF on the power. Please note that in the photo below I have the plus side marked on the capacitor, this is incorrect as the board is marked erroneously and I translated that error to my cap as you can see in the photo. Check the supply on your radio with a meter before installing caps that can not be reverse biased. We all know how that would end…

One last thing I also did was to add some heatsinks (also per the video above) to the power devices inside the radio to help them survive use during digital modes. They worked just fine when I ran them with CW but when operating digital, the duty cycle is a lot higher so I didn’t want to risk thermal failure because of something as simple as adding a heat sink. This also comes from the above video and just made sense to me too, so I added them. The radio operates great and I really like using it for FT8 when calling CQ (more on this later) as well as for CW. I have some other mods planned for the future so another blog post describing these mods will be in order at some point. Till then, thanks for your time and attention and I hope this helps someone out there with their radio.

WK4DS

72

K-6307 Herky Huffman/ Bull Creek WMA Activation AAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

72

de WK4DS - David

Activating K-1832 Anastasia SP in Florida!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

73

WK4DS - David

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After having such good runs on 20 and 30 meters I figured I would drop down to 40 meters and see what was going on there. Forty meters was not happy today, well at this point in the day that is. Seems that the atmosphere was not happy with my attempt at this band and only allowed me 3 QSOs before I called it quits and went QRT with 80 QSOs in the log for one day. I wrapped up the radio and antenna system and then headed home with a new park and a ton of contacts, what else do you need for a great day of radio? I will go back to this park again but next time I want to go on a week day and see what I can do with less people in the park. But until then, I hope to hear you on the air. 73 WK4DS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POTA Activation AAR and some antenna testing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

72

WK4DS

A POTA activation that was incredibly rewarding!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then…I…got…on…twenty…

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

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

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

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

72

WK4DS - David

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

de WK4DS

DX QSL Cards are Awesome!!!

I once did 100% QSL with paper cards… those days are long gone though. It turned into this huge project to keep up with them to the point that I spent more time working on the QSL cards than I did on the air.

It was at this point that I decided to alter my strategy for QSL management to the one I am using currently. This strategy led to me getting this letter in the mail.

My current (and sustainable as well) process is to cherry pick the QSOs I send cards to. I have some criteria that I use though.

• Ragchews almost always get a card. If the other op doesn’t QSL I wont but usually I send one for this.

• QRP contacts whether from my home or abroad will also usually get a card. To clarify that is they are QRP. I work it so much that I dont use my radio as a factor. Same exclusions as above here too.

• DX if it is a country I have never worked before. Actually this criteria is a mandatory QSL…as long as they do QSL.

• If I just want to is the last one.

So back in July, I did a POTA activation at K-2169 and used my Ten Tec Argonaut 5 transceiver for the activation. On that day the bands were in great shape and so I start On 15 meters and after a while moved down to 17 meters to get a few contacts in the log. I felt pretty confident 17 would be good as I had already worked two DX stations on 15 meters. Albeit fairly close to home, but they were still DX none the less.

Well, I work several US hams and they are coming in sporadically but then I hear this station that is clean but weak. I thought at first I had missed the first letter of his call as I heard a J next, we went through the “on air gymnastics” of asking for the call again and when I got it, I was blown away to realize it was a Japan station!!! I had to send him a card! So I write one out and check his QRZ and he does QSL, so threw in a few green stamps to help offset his costs and off it went into the mail. Today, I got my reply…

In the photo above you will see three cards, one is handwritten, one ís typed and one is a different card altogether. The odd one is an extra card he sent that was his old QSL. That is awesome to me. I love getting these in the mail. If you will notice he has a 4 element beam so that combined with good band conditions allowed my 20 watts to reach him in Japan.

It is interesting to me that I will get so accustomed to hearing the 4 US call letters first that when I hear one from somewhere else, it “breaks my brain” for lack of a better term. I am listening so much for A, N, W & K that I completely miss the other letters most of the time. I actually can catch V calls pretty good now as I have worked many since starting POTA activating regularly but it is the exception. This has prompted me to listen on the bands more to try to hear DX calls and not lose my marbles when I hear one… lol. I copied a Swedish station the other day first try and was kinda stoked so my practice is working. But this is a side effect of being a US amateur working a lot of POTA in the eastern USA, you do get accustomed to hearing certain prefixes a lot (or at least I do). I have a bunch of those stories if you want me to recount them at some point…

Do you have any odd idiosyncrasies that you run into while operating on the air? Let’s hear them! Till next time 72

de WK4DS - David

A couple of quick activations testing the antennas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The weather can be fickle…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

de WK4DS 72

Component failure sucks…

When things dont go right it can be frustrating but when things are like my activation recently they are downright demoralizing…

So I had an evening free and wanted to do some POTA so I decide to setup in the truck with my hamsticks … since it is faster… you know since everything is ready to go. Little did I know what I was about to get into.

So I goto the frisbee golf parking area and get everything out to do an in-truck activation. This is how I operate if it is raining and has worked well for me in the past. I just tape a “rain shield” to the coax connector made from a peanut package with both ends cut out. Haha, reuse at its finest. But today, I didnt need it since it was not raining.

Next I break out the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and my N3ZN cw key and connect it with my HamGadgets PicoKeyer and I am all set. Another thing with today is I planned to activate with my 8Ah LiFePO4 battery to see if it can handle an activation with the Argonaut 5. I have my inline power meter this time so I can monitor the voltage too. I also can monitor Amp/hour usage but completely forgot to do this since I got wrapped up in other things. I setup this kit in the cab of the truck as you see so that I could sit comfortably while being in the truck. This works really well when I am solo, but gets tougher if I bring someone with me. As you can see below it was up to almost 3 Ah by the time I took this photo. I wished I had thought to get a photo of it at the end to have that data. I guess I will have to do it again… lol.

But before all this got started I connected my antenna and wanted to check the SWR before starting as I have been experimenting with the radials some here lately and have learned some interesting things about them. I get out my nanoVNA and connect it to the antenna and it shows like it isn’t there…at all. I mess with the VNA a while and try to see if it might have a loose adapter on the VNA or if the calibration might have been done wrong, which I found not to be the case after calibrating it again… Nothing in the VNA was wrong, so I get out of the truck and inspect the antenna and it looks right, nothing is out of the ordinary. I go back and get my trusty little multimeter and decide to ohm the center pin of the coax to the shield to see what it measures, it should be open to the meter…it isn’t, quite the opposite actually, it is shorted. So I immediately go to the antenna and disconnect my brand new, reputable brand coax and check it with it removed from the antenna, it measures good now. Whew! That was close! I didn’t want my new coax to be bad right out of the chute.

So now that I am pretty sure it isn’t the coax, I turn my attention to the antenna. I remove the radiator and test the base to center pin and it reads shorted!! What in the world is going on here!?!? I look closely at the mount, which at this point has the BNC to PL259 adapter on it and nothing else and so I remove the top portion of the antenna mount to make sure water has not entered the plate where it passed through and has created a path with corrosion to the mount. Nope, not there, it looks perfect.

So I remove the adapter and the short goes away immediately. I reinstall it and it returns. I remove the adapter and check it and it measures fine and so does the antenna mount now. What gives? Well, I had a new adapter I picked up at the hamfest from the Wireman and I just installed it to see what would happen. The problem vanished. I tried wiggling the antenna and the coax and pushed and pulled on the adapter and the meter didn’t change a bit, all I can figure is that something in the other adapter is shorting when the adapter bottoms out on the antenna mount at the point where it gets tight.

This is what went bad. On the surface from every angle it looks perfect, but when tightened in place it produces a dead short across the antenna to ground. Don’t blindly think that simple things like this can’t fail. Obviously they can. I will be more diligent in checking my system routinely too. The Argonaut 5 has no SWR meter on it, which is pretty much the only thing about it I don’t like, so I have to use other means of monitoring the SWR. The VNA was that tool today.

Once that was sorted out, I was able to get on the air and make some contacts. Since I was dancing with the end of the UTC day, I figured I would start on 20 meters to improve my odds of getting an activation before the day flips over. The hunters came in clutch and I EASILY made the activation. Once I cleared all the calling stations, I QSYed to 17 meters to see what I could do there as the band was open earlier…before I found the bad antenna adapter…

Turns out 17 meters right during grey line to the west coast will net some cool contacts. All but one are from the west coast and that is always fun as I rarely get to work California due to noise on the bands. All in all, I netted 41 contacts in the log all before the UTC day ended. So it all worked out anyway. Moral to the story is two fold. The first one is to take extra parts for your system and two is don’t assume anything… this adapter looked perfect visually but did not work when installed. Have fun y’all and I hope to hear you on the air soon.

PS: Another perk to working POTA is things like these photos I grabbed of the clouds. You normally don’t see these at home in the house. If I had stayed home or threw in the towel on the antenna (which I almost did) I would not have seen these beautiful sunset clouds.

73 de WK4DS

222mhz Repeater upgrades for better reliability.

When KG4WBI decides to do something, he does it right. So we finally got a stable repeater operating at the repeater site. It has a little bit of a hot receiver, but it is working so we are not complaining.

Above you can see the new and improved KG4WBI 1.25m repeater in operation! This system works like a charm and we have been happily giving it a good work out ever since he built this out.

Up till recently we have been using an old GE Master II (2 meter repeater) that has been retuned to work on 1.25 meters. This was apparently no small feat either as there were extensive notes about what had to be done and all the new information was written out meticulously. This was nice as we soon ran into a problem with it due to the old solder joints and corroded connectors were making it have a plethora of problems. We would chase one down and get it fixed only to find another one a day or two later. What clued us in that we had a good location for the repeater though was that we had found out that we had been talking on the repeater with the finals shut down so it was literally transmitting with the preamp, we found it in the manual and it was something like 90mW if I remember right. I can be wrong here, but that is what I think it was… needless to say it wasn’t much, and were able to ragchew on it and have a great time for the most part. So the tuned repeater antenna up 50 feet above the grade on the brow of the mountain was an excellent location.

Here you have yours truly putting the coax on the wall with plastic “one hole” style tie downs. We wanted to do this so that it wouldn’t risk crushing the coax as we tighten it down.

Well the preamp finally went out too and we actually had to shut the repeater down for a while till we could go work on it. So we get a day and go trouble shoot on it a while and the problem comes and goes while we are there looking at it and the silly thing even juiced up the PA for a few minutes to full output while were testing into a dummy load. Then it all went out again and there was nothing we could do without an oscilloscope to check for signal. At this point we shut it back off and go home to look at oscilloscopes to see what we could find that would work up to 250mhz…

In the mean time, Roger gets out a couple of mobile 222 radios he has and orders a Hamgadgets repeater controller off the interwebs. He then proceeds to build a working repeater out of these two radios with only a couple of slight modifications and just goes to the site and temporarily connects them to the existing duplexer and powers the system on. It takes him a few minutes to get a few of the settings right and BAM! The KG4WBI 1.25m repeater is back on the air! These radios work surprisingly well too. We ran it like that for a few weeks with the radios laying on a 5 gallon bucket if memory serves. Well, once we figure out that these radios work fine in this role, we decided to make the install a little more permanent and get all the repeater parts out of his son’s way so he can work on cars again… lol. You see, his son wants his garage back so he can tinker on project cars…

The antenna is sitting on top of a 48’ push up pole that we guyed too to the site once we got it raised just to eliminate any chance of wind blowing it over. The power supply below was chosen for the main power supply should we choose to run it on mains again directly at some point. So this is here for that expansion should we choose to do it.

Instead we chose the route below. We have a 10 amp smart battery charger wired to these batteries and since we are only running 25 watts, the whole thing only draw about 7 or 8 amps on transmit. I want to say we tested it and measured right at 7 amps on transmit, but this means that if the power fails for any reason, this repeater will not miss a beat for many hours. something on the order of 30 straight hours of transmit… Which means in reality it will last 2 or three days of casual use before the batteries expire. By then we will have been able to take some solar cells to the site or even a small generator should we want it to stay online past that. Most power outages for us in this area will last less than one full day so this means we should never have the repeater go offline for power failure 99% of the time.

As you can see above, Roger also installed a copious amount of these RFI chokes on the power wires everywhere! These work reasonably well and are really easy to install so there isn’t really a reason not to take the precaution and use a few of them. We were hoping to suppress and RFI coming out of the smart charger and as far as we can tell, either the charger has good radio noise suppression or these chokes did the trick…or a combination thereof.

Below you can see one of Roger’s experiments. This is part of the “if one is good then two is better” plan. He is testing how clean the skirts are with the smaller duplexer wired in series with the larger one. It has incredible sensitivity on receive without even a hint of the transmitter RF in it. I think this actually worked… Out of this duplexer you see the coax going into the lightening protector which is grounded with that huge ground wire you see in the photo. The coax then comes out of the lightening arrestor and heads out to the antenna with LMR 400 DB.

I just wanted to share something about ham radio that wasn’t a POTA activation for a change… lol. Thanks for reading along and 73

WK4DS - David