blogs
I am elated. Yesterday I received another oversized envelope in the mail from CQ magazine. This time it contained a certificate for my performance in the 2009 WPX SSB contest. My results in the SOAB QRP category: 1ST in the 8th call area, 4TH in the USA, 6TH in North America!!! I am stoked! Am I a big gun or what?
Sheesh! What might I be able to do if I had a tower and a tribander? It just goes to show ya that wires in the trees on a small city lot can do a lot with some perseverence and preparation.
73 de kt8k - Tim
With the big contests (CQWW and Sweepstakes) behind me I didn't really do much in the ARRL 160m and 10m contests ... until the NAQP (North American QSO Party) weekends. I wasn't planning to operate, but got on during the afternoon of the NAQP CW and amazed myself. I ran 14017 (+/- a few hundred Hertz) for over an hour at one point, racking up over 60 Qs/hour. I got my first two 3-QSO minutes and had the rate meter bouncing off 140 Qs/hour on N1MM. I only operated for 3:10 but I was wowed - I felt like a big gun the way stations were piling up in 2's and 3's on me.
After long being tired of the poor performance of my HF9v with 18 radials, I finally sold it off to a fellow ARROW club member for what I had invested (not a lot) and was left with the radial field in the woods (now mostly buried after 3 years). I let it sit for a while, wandering out there every few weeks to prune a few branches and stare at the mast and wires sticking out of the berm between my yard and the freeway. I went by it when I was re-working the big horizontal loop, which broke around Labor Day, and kept thinking of what to do ... pull up the radials?
RufZxP -- For the past year I have been playing with RufZxP, a free CW practice program from a Russian ham, and really enjoying it. It sends you callsigns at your chosen rate and you enter them into the keyboard just as if you were in a CW contest using logging software. You earn a score for getting a callsign correct, and I think the score is greater for longer and more complex callsigns. Then, after you get a callsign correct, the program sends the next one a little faster, and if you make an error it will slow down the next call.
W8UM FD '09 was another big success, and attendance and activity were great. I was the roving CW station captain this year, operated on all HF bands but 40, and ran about 98% of the time. I had planned to be a dedicated 80m CW station, but the band just didn't provide much during daylight hours - only a small disappointment - so I wound up on 20m and 15m a lot, which was great because 20m was Cooking!
Spring contest season demanded a new antenna that would handle 160m with some efficiency and compliment my other antennas. I settled on the >1 wavelength horizontal loop for its multi-band potential, relative invisibility, and ease of matching. Anything over a wavelength on 160m (540' length) would be sufficient, but longer is better, as it lowers radiation angles and improves performance.
Now that I've lived on the second highest spot in town for a year and a half, and have had time to put up (and take down) a good number of antennas, I think I have an appreciation for what makes an antenna really work well. Since I have no tower or beam, the following observations apply only to my dipoles, which vary in height and orientation. The clear winner among my antennas is my 20/40/80 inverted vee (fan dipole) with the feed point at around 55-60' and 80m ends (the longest of the three common-fed dipoles) at 20'.
Dang! A year has passed without a direct follow-up on station construction here, so rather than trying to chronologically catch up I will review what I've been using in the fall contest season and give a bit of info on how I got here.
I now have 5 (count' em) Five antennas for HF!
A strange question? Maybe not.
There have been no meetings scheduled for some time.
There is no activity on 146.96. The Monday Night Net has virtually ceased to exist.
Calls to the club officers have produced no results.
What's going on? Does anybody know? Does anybody care?
Mike Root, WA3THT
As the leaves turn and begin to fall, the young ham's thoughts turn to getting those antennas fixed up and ready for the winds of Winter (and HF contest season). My HF9v vertical has been performing poorly for some time and my vertical 40m full wave loop has seen little use, as the 20/40/80 inverted vee outperforms it consistently, so it is time for some changes.
Since I reconnected the coax to it, my vertical dipole - a tribander driven element hung from a high tree branch - has still not seemed to work well. I would switch back and forth between it and my 20/40/80 horizontal fan dipole, and the horizontal was always at least an S-unit better. In the WPX SSB contest the vertical dipole was only better when the signal came from directly off the end of the horizontal dipole, and I began to think I had water in the coax.
As of May 2008 I have successfully topped 10,000 QSOs in only 6 years running 5 watts maximum on HF and using only wires and verticals. I haven't done the stats, but probably 96%+ of that was in contests, which involves another goal - to score among the top ten nationally in the QRP category, and I have done that at least once and maybe several times (CQ scores take a year to compute, ARRL scores a bit less) ...
I have a file tracking such things ... time to take another look at it. So far:
I was 9th QRP/single-op in the US in CQWW DX SSB 2005 after an 11th in 2004.
Actually, I can't answer that question, except to suggest that far-too-often Murphy is with us. (A curse I thought of in college, and a particularly bad one IMHO, is to wish someone "May Murphy be with you.") In any case, as the winter weather hit hard-hard-hard over the past 6-8 weeks, not only did my tribander driven element (tied vertically to a tree branch at least 60 feet up) finally reach complete deafness, but, suddenly, my HF9v multiband vertical (ground mounted) went deaf, too.
I am on cloud 9! My mail contained a large envelope from the ARRL containing a certificate awarding me 1st place, QRP division, in Michigan and 10th place, QRP division, in the U.S. in the 2007 ARRL International DX Phone Contest! I guess all that antenna work paid off. And that was before I did last Summer and Fall's improvements and additions. Now I'm wondering how I did in the 2007 Fall contests (I know I did at least as well as in '06 on most or all ...).
The Summer passed, and I never got around to building the fan vertical I described in episode 11. The 40/80 fan dipole languishes, coiled up in a box in the basement. I keep thinking about putting it up, and may yet ... perhaps as an NVIS antenna. But I still wasn't satisfied!
Well, with the new fan dipole built for 40 and 80m, I was ready to put it up. It looked pretty sturdy, and I felt I would be able to get it up in the air SOMEHOW.
http://www.spar-hams.org
Society for the Preservation of Amateur Radio
The WPX CW contest has been much on my mind since the late Fall contests. This one is a personal favorite. But what about that big horizontal loop I've wanted so badly? I REALLY wanted to get it up before the contest.
From: "Dan KB6NU"
Subject: Re: SV1???
Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 08:34:22 -0400
To: "J. Eller"
-smiles-
That's yet another good reason to operate CW.
73, Dan KB6NU
On May 17, 2007, at 2:53 AM, J. Eller wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I had my most frustrating attempt at a qso with a sv1
> station. The fellow kept saying kilo 8 echo lima romeo
> but I could not make out his call. All I could hear
> was SV1 and noise. SV1 is a greece station I just
> looked it up. It's almost 3 am. I guess I'll take a
Today I received a really nice QSL card. It was from PJ2T Curacao Netherlands Antilles. Considering I have only had HF privleges since Februrary and the wire dipole hanging on the side of my garage I'd say I'm doing ok.
73
Jim
K8ELR
I am fairly new but I have been interested in Ham radio for years. I had a science teacher in the sixth grade who was a ham. His name was Simon Crison. This was in about 1962. I would love to see his listing in an old call book from that period.
I worked as an Engineer for 14 years at an Areospace/defense contractor based in a suburb of Detroit. Not all industry around Detoit is automotive. I then worked for another defense contractor in the same area for another 3 years.
Now to consider the antennas again.
The 10-15-20 dipole I suspended in a tree last Fall had become very lossy, and I suspected water in the coax. In fact, it had become quite deaf, so I lowered it down to the ground (with difficulty, as both the rope and the feedline were tangled in tree branches by the winds of Winter). As it turned out, the reason it was deaf was that the tree had snapped the center conductor connection, tearing the wire from its ring lug. No wonder it wasn't hearing very well any more ...
March 30, 2007
Finally, the ice storms etc. seem to be over, but now the thunderstorms are appearing, turning my thoughts to lightning protection.
After reading, and reading, and reading, from everything from the Polyphaser documentation on the web to forum entries about the topic at eHam.net, I felt ready to get this part of the project started. I was also becoming very nervous about the increasing frequency of thunderstorm forecasts, and the fact that a few scattered storms had come near to my station over the past couple of weeks.
Please use the nice set of weather related links on my ham radio related website at www.findmydates.com/hamradio.htm
You will find that the radars may be of special interest. Nice collection of regional, state and local radars. These may give you a heads-up on weather from WI!
Looking forward to contacts on HF as I've just passed my Extra class license exam. Started with Tech 3 - 4 months before.
Other neat ham radio links on my site include two news feeds and a web controlable radio!
73's!
Jon - AB9NN
Green Bay, WI
Big fun the other night. Tuning around 15m at 5:30PM after work, and hearing nothing but hiss, even with the preamp on. Then ... a very faint CW signal around 21028 ... I listened hard for about 10 minutes and got a "VK9" ... then finally assembled the full call: VK9DNX. They were working stations as fast as they could, but calling CQ from time to time, and not working many US stations at all. I called them about 6 times but was not being heard. So I broke down and dialed the rig up from its usual 5 watts to 100 watts -- they heard me on the first call and gave me the usual 599 report.
Nov. 7, 2007
The proof is in the pudding, and SSCW was the perfect place to find out just how the station would do with its three antennas - the HF9v with (now) 8 radials over 33' length, the dual band "fan" dipole on 15/40/80, and the low-swinging vertical dipole in the woods on 10/15/20.
The contest went better than I expected. I ran 5 watts from my Orion as always, and was able to switch between antennas using a combination of the front panel and an old rotary antenna switch.
Oct. 31, 2007
I was fired up again last night, with one antenna up, and ready to get into the next. I dug out a 500' roll of black 14 gauge THNN hookup wire and got busy.
Out in the driveway I pulled out two 67.5 foot lengths of the hookup wire. I got my soldering iron heating up in the garage, and used the point to make two holes each in three toothbrushes saved for the purpose - they make pretty good antenna insulators (and the birdies can brush their teeth while perched on the antenna).
|
