Park

Portable Doublet

I built a doublet experiment at a park today.

• split 6.25M of speaker wire to be a 12.5M-long, center-fed, non-resonant dipole, like my portable EFRW I usually carry.
• the rest is balanced feed line
• right to the radio
• tuned 20M and barely tuned 40M on my X6100
• 2W FT8 heard in africa and europe
• next try it with a 4:1 or 9:1 balun to match better

My Weeks in Radio

• feel lucky to be in this area with lots of repeaters and traffic
• flagpole with YAGI snapped in the wind a week or 2 ago.
• strung the slim jim in the tree a little higher
• playing with nicsure firmware on the RadTel RT-880G.
• saw a great youtube video on APRS bots:
  • MPAD being very versatile for: weather, callsign lookup, location report to email
  • ISS bot that tells you the next pass
• listened to a couple sweepstakes contacts: to lazy to try to communicate that much exchange QRP SSB

Others

• WB3LNY, George:
  • Tried La Grange repeater in KY, but no one answered.
  • Keep as active as we can.
  • Use it or lose it: they’ll take it away
  • linking repeaters may help generate more traffic
• VE3HOH, Pete:
  • working on some Yaesu FT-100’s
    • predecessor to FT-857.
• KA3TKW, Tom:
  • lunch Thursday this week
    • everyone share a radio gadget
    • lots of mini demonstrations
  • ISS scrubbed the SSTV after first couple days
  • ISS ham repeater is still good though
    • high pass monday, 4:45pm
  • Russian satellites doing SSTV
    • 435.890 ARCTICSAT-1: 2 good passes Monday morning
    • 5 minute cycle, so don’t be discouraged
• KK4KKW, Steve:
  • many times can’t make contacts while traveling: 2M or 10M
  • hearing people on HF, but not making contacts
• N7JMS, John:
  • digipi doing SSTV to get ARCTICSAT-1 images
• K3DMM, Denny:
  • doing some of the sweepstakes
    • got Hawaii
  • definitely trying morning pass of arcticsat-1
  • trying for ISS pass as well
• KD3BOV, John:
  • rain gutter antenna
  • getting started with the ICOM 2730

Swap and Shop

• WB3LNY, george:
  • new bird dummy loads
• VE3HOH, Pete:
  • rohn 25 tower sections:
  • guy wire and anti-sway section for the rohn 25
  • 432MHz yagis
  • 2M yagis for weak signal
  • 950ft of philly strand on a roll
• KA3TKW, Tom:
  • shortware receivers
  • moto 25W transceivers
  • 24ft camper for sale: $1500

US-4567, Capt John Smith Chesapeake Trail, stretches from New York to the Chesapeake Bay following the Susquehanna River, so that means we can activate from any public land within 100ft of the river. I drove from Turkey Hill to Bainbridge evaluating spots along the river:

• Riverfront park in Columbia would be nice
• The boat launch on south side of Marietta has a nice bit of beach.
• The park on the north side of Marietta is a bit too busy, but did have a nice area of grass and trees.
• I setup at the Riverfront park in Bainbridge.

I threw the EFHW into an inverted-V in tree and back down to a bench. I worked SSB first for some park-to-park activations, and then switched to FT8 on 40m.

Matt and I activated POTA US-1743, White Clay Creek, DE. I deployed the 20m-long EFHW into a tree, which worked nicely with no SWR. Matt deployed a telescoping dipole on a mast. I worked only 40m, and Matt ran 20m. We didn’t interfere with each other at all. I forgot my 5525 power splitter to run both the laptop and radio off 12V battery, but fortunately I didn’t need it for the computer.