I was seeing high SWR on the 80M EFHW: over 3:1+. I found counterpoise was chewed and broken, so I twisted it back together, but I saw no change. I disconnected the counterpoise completely, and that made no difference: still 3:1. I finally unscrewed and re-screwed the rusty alligator clamp and reattached it. That fixed it!
Previously, it seemed I’d sometimes see high SWR for a a moment, then it would recover. It seemed like giving it a little power would “clean up” something.
I activated US-9719 Susquehanna Riverlands with 2W on the new Mag Loop. It made for a very quick setup, and I tried different directions. I got 11 contacts on 40m.
I logged 11 contacts for the ARRL DIGI contest. The email from log system said I earned 41 points (based on distance). I kept it to 2W and 4W and mostly FT4 with some FT8.
I straightened the elements, and replaced the driven elements that were loose with longer elements for sturdier mount. I trimmed the new elements to tune, and soldered a new hairpin match to further reduce SWR to 1.5:1. With this repair, I’m tickling S9 reception, again, listening to W3GMS (146.985) pointing in the their direction.
I further tested by checking in to the West Control in Hellam Township with 5W and the YAGI aimed West. I didn’t hear many other people, and Central Control (W3NY) was booming.
I purchased the Alpha Antenna Alpha Loop Jr+ Mag Loop from Tom, KA3TKW. It’s built of a tuner box, loops of LMR400, and a tripod, and tunes 40m-10m.
Tuning is pretty cool with the geared box, but still pretty touchy. Tuning is very necessary: a band will be completely quiet until tuned, and then noise and signal really increases. I tried it inside, and it didn’t work so well: lots of inside RFI.
Outside, it worked much better, but the 80M EFHW is still better: higher, and broader bandwidth.
The directionality and tuning is neat I can wiggle the spacing of the inner loop to the outer loop to “adjust” induction / SWR. The high Q means efficiency, but I need to re-tune the capacitor any time I move around the band.
APRSDroid
would often fail to reconnect to the UV-PRO:
java.io.IOException: read failed, socket might closed or timeout, read ret: -1
The HT
app would manage to reconnect OK.
I would need to cycle power on the radio to get APRSDroid
to reconnect.
In APRSDroid,
Preferences->Connection Preferences->Channel was set to 1.
I blanked that channel setting,
and now it may be reconnecting
between stop and start of app,
bluetooth,
or distance.
As a side note, having the UV-PRO monitoring a frequency other than APRS may interfere with packet reception. I don’t see as many APRS packets when monitoring another repeater, probably due to interruptions from the non-APRS audio.
Morning Grind uses NetLogger to log, and it has an API I can use to scrape check-ins:
The question of the day was: What games do you play? Lots of good discussion ensued. I offered Morsle, and W3EO offered free42, hp42 emulator.
DX Mentor Podcast 67 with KF8KI from QRZ.com was an excellent listen. I learned that QRZ.com has location in 2 places:
I was curious about the different implementations for building an AllStar node.
HamVOIP is closed source, and has more DTMF commands by default. It’s only built on RaspberryPI. The 985 group has been circulating some new tutorials based on HamVOIP.
AllStarLink is open-source, and some DTMF codes need to be added. It can be deployed on RaspberryPI or a computer. AllStarLink makes the most sense to me for my values.
