2m

Since the flagpole Yagi fell, and I’m not rushing to put it back up, I figured I’d see if I can get my 2-meter antennas in the tree higher.

I threw the line up over the tree to have it drop down the middle, and I now pull the slim-jim antenna up through the middle of the tree. It’s not the highest antenna, above the ground-plane antenna.

I also took a moment to untangle the halyards and feed lines. I looped the 2 feed lines through a spring clip on the roof line to keep them from slapping around so much.

I’m getting good APRS decodes off the lower antenna, and strong repeater signals on the high antenna, but it doesn’t quite receive the 985 repeater.

7 December was apparently Skywarn Recognition Day, so a station in Mount Holly, NJ, WX2PHI, was celebrating by making contacts on the N3KZ repeater system, so at 5:15pm EST, I keyed up my HT to the mobile antenna on my car and reported 32F and clear sky. It was good to know I could key up the N3KZ node in York from over here in Lancaster.

I followed calculations and instructions to build a quarter-wave ground plane antenna from some wire and a UHF connector that I picked up at the last Ham Fest in Harrisburg. I cut everything a little long and soldered it together. I trimmed the radials to about 54-inches and folded and rolled the radiator wire to a length that is resonant at 147MHz. I measured with the NanoVNA. Once it was at the right frequency, I found that bending the radials up and down could adjust the SWR at its lowest point on the graph. Keeping the radials slightly flatter had a lower SWR than the 45 degrees suggested in the original design.

This ground plane antenna feeds from the bottom, which is physically more sound than the vertical dipole I had up previously. I tested it last night when I strung it up, and it reaches Harrisburg and Parkesburg with no problem.

The Working Configuration

I’ve gotten APRS working with my current gear. I’m running my UV-K5 running egzumer 0.22.0 and VOX enabled. I set the radio volume pretty high, about 75%, and connected the BTech APRS cable and a USB-C 3.5mm audio adapter to my Pixel 6 Pro for an audio connection. The volume on the phone was set to nearly 100% volume. I ran APRSDroid in AFSK mode on the phone.

I watched for my position to show up on the map on https://aprs.fi/.

The Stuff That Didn’t Work

With nunu firmware, I needed to key it manually, but it worked. VOX didn’t work in the nunu 0.20.5, so I switch back to egzumer for working VOX.

Next Steps

I’ll next try to find an old phone to run the APRSDroid and try to use the Explorer QRZ-1, so I can dedicate some hardware to this project.