I spent last weekend in Port Austin, MI, at the tip of “The Thumb.” (If you’re a Michigander, you know what I’m talking about. If you’re not a Michigander, see the map at right.)
In addition to enjoying the cooler weather by Lake Huron, I wanted to test out my portable station, as I intend to operate from the Pointe aux Barques Lighthouse during the National Lighthouse and Lightship Weekend, on August 3-4. Sadly, I did not get to operate last weekend, as I failed to bring some essential equipment, including a length of coax to connect an antenna to my KX3. I was kind of disappointed, but that did give me more time to enjoy the lake.
Even so, I wanted to be prepared for next weekend, so I decided to set up this morning in a park just up the street from me. I took several antennas with me to see what would work the best. As you can see below, I brought my BuddiStick (attached to the table on the right side of the photo below) and what I call my “GOTA antenna,” which is a 40-meter/20-meter inverted-V, supported by a surplus military mast (shown on the left side of the photo). Prem, AC8QV, helped me put up the inverted-V antenna.
My tests were an unqualified success. Almost immediately, I made three 20-meter CW contacts using the BuddiStick. These stations were all U.S. contacts, but I could hear several Europeans in there. I called several of them, but my 10 W just wasn’t making it across the pond.
My first contact with the inverted-V antenna was a QRP-QRP contact with Mark, KF5YOE, in Texas. After talking to Mark, I decided to switch to 40m. Not only that, I thought I’d try phone instead of CW. Come to think of it, I don’t think that I’d ever made a phone contact with the KX3. As it turned out, my first (and only) contact on 40 meters was with K4YTZ, a club station that was operating in a park in South Carolina. They gave me a very nice report, and we had a nice chat about operating park to park.
After that contact, I came across NA1WJ, the amateur radio station at the Scouting World Jamboree. I was hoping to work them, and perhaps say hi to Bill, NE4RD, but they never came back to me.
By that time, Prem and I were getting hungry, so we packed up and headed for a Subway. Overall, however, we had a great time. The weather was nice, the band conditions were decent, and we made a couple of nice contacts.
As far as the antennas go, the inverted-V seemed to work better than the BuddiStick. Of course, that’s to be expected—it’s a full-size antenna after all. I’m going to take the BuddiStick with me next weekend, but I expect that I’ll be using the inverted-V if there’s a good place to set it up.
I was also testing my new BioEnno battery. Previous portable operations used a small rechargeable battery that I’d purchased from some camping store. It worked fine with my Kx1, but it just couldn’t supply enough current to power the KX3 at 10 W, and the KX3 would always fall back to 5 W. At first, I thought there was a problem was with the KX3, but then it occurred to me that it might be the battery. I bought the BioEnno battery a couple months ago, and tested it briefly when I got it, but this was its real test. As much as I hate Gordon West’s continual flogging of BioEnno batteries on Ham Nation, I do have to admit that they work pretty well.
csweningsen says
Hi, what’s the height of the mast on the 40 – 20 in the park? Are those metal mast sections?
Dan KB6NU says
No. Those are the surplus fiberglass mast sections. There are six of them for a total just short of 24-ft. I have another section that I usually use as well, which brings the height to just short of 28 ft.
Dave New, N8SBE says
The radio propagation gods were smiling on us this past weekend. I spent the last couple of days at the Detroit Maker Faire, running one of the special event stations (N8M) there. I was on 40 meters the whole time, using a G5RV up about 40 ft. It wasn’t flat, so it was in a half-inverted vee configuration, and G5RV’s are notorious for not operating well if not strung flat.
Jim, W8MR, made a number of CW contacts, and later I ran FT8 off and on over the remainder of the weekend, making a few dozen contacts We had a lot of visitors, and I found myself often talking to visitors, showing off the station (K3s/P3 with 17″ SVGA display) so not a lot of operating time, I’m afraid.
I did notice, though, that there were a lot of signals on 40 meters in the range I could see with the panoramic display from 7.0-7.2 MHz. I could see CW, digital, and SSB signals there, and the band looked reasonably busy. About 5pm ET on Saturday, 40 went ‘long’ and I was seeing EU and other DX signals coming in on FT8. Occasionally, I tuned to CW and SSB signals to demonstrate those to visitors, and the signals were fairly strong, and usually copyable in spite of the Tesla coil display that was going on intermittently elsewhere in the Faire.
This year, we were on the front lawn of The Henry Ford (that’s the official name of the museum), so we didn’t have access to the roof to install antennas. This seemed to work out better for us, because it got us away from the interference from all the open-case microprocessor-based maker exhibitors. On the other hand, we were running off of generators, so we had to put up with the audible noise. We also struggled for a couple of hours on Saturday morning, because we kept popping the GFCI on the generator outlet. After replacing the generator, without a change in behavior, we finally discovered that a 3D printer power supply apparently had some sort of ground fault. As long as we left that out of the circuit, the generator was happy.
We had some initial problems with the 20 meter station, which was running a Yaesu 991 on SSB and using a ground-mount 6BTV vertical. Whenever they transmitted, the phase noise from the 991 was wiping us out on 40 meters. When we added a 20M contest filter to the 991, the problem went away. Conest filters are highly recommended for any multi-multi setup, like Field Day or other situations where there are multiple transmitters operating in close proximity. Note that if the 991 was operating on 40 meter SSB, the typical contest filter wouldn’t have protected us from that noisy transmitter. The 20M SSB station made a few contacts, but there was some sort of contest going on, and they kept getting chased off their published frequency of 14.250 MHz.
At least ham manufacturers are finally starting to pay attention to things like transmitter phase noise, but you still have to be careful which rigs you bring to a multi=multi.