This weekend, I spent a lot of time doing my taxes, but that, of course, is not radio-related. :)
What I did do on Saturday that was radio related is to help Colin KD8CCQ put up an HF antenna and get him on the air. We actually took a crack at this a couple months ago, but our efforts didn’t work out too well.
Colin had purchased an SG-239 automatic antenna tuner, and I had the bright idea to set up a doublet fed with ladder line. I had most of the the parts, and Colin had about 80 feet of antenna wire, so we gave it a go. I went over there one day, and we threw some rope up into a couple of trees he has at his place and hauled up the doublet.
Unfortunately, the thing never worked. The SGC-239 could just not tune the antenna. Colin’s guess is that something’s wrong with the antenna tuner. I now have it in my shack awaiting testing. A thought just occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t do such a great job connecting the ladder line to the antenna wire. I used the Emtech Ladder Grabber, and I don’t think I actually checked for continuity after putting it all together.
In the meantime, Colin’s been off the air. Also, in the meantime, he decided to upgrade his rig from an IC-706 to an IC-756PROIII. And, after our unsuccessful attempt with the doublet, he decided to purchas an Alpha-Delta multiband dipole antenna.
Now, all we needed to do was get this antenna up in the air. To help with this task, I called on Jack, AB8RK. He’d put together a homebrew EZ Hang, a device that combines a slingshot and fishing reel to more easily launch ropes into trees. The first line went pretty smoothly, but the second was a bit more problematic.
One reason for this is that the second tree was a spruce, and there wasn’t really a clear shot. We got the line over an outstretched branch, but it didn’t look all that secure. We tried pulling the line in closer to the trunk, and when we didn’t have much success with that, we decided to try another shot. That shot wasn’t much better than the first one, so Jack tried it again. Unfortunately, on this attempt, the plastic molding holding the slingshot together broke. So, in the end, we had to settle for the first line.
Overall, we goofed around with this for a couple of hours, but eventually, we got the antenna up about thirty-five feet. While the other two guys cleaned up outside, I went inside and put the antenna analyzer on the antenna. On 40m, the SWR was less than 2.0 across the whole band, on 10m, the SWR was pretty good, too. As expected, on 80m the SWR was less that 2.0 over about 100 kHz, centered on 3850. On 20m, the SWR seemed a bit high, but usable with the 756PRO’s internal antenna tuner.
After a little pizza and beer, we fired up the radio and worked a special event station in Florida. I had to take off at this point, but Colin reports that he’s made a bunch of QSOs in the last couple of days. Some of those contacts were Georgia QSO Party contacts.
I also worked the Georgia QSO Party. I made about 21 contacts total, with three of them being phone contacts. There certainly wasn’t as much activity as there was for the VA QSO Party last month. In the VA QSO Party, I made 51 contacts for just about the same amount of time operating.
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