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.

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Joined the Club

My membership was approved, so SPARC now has 146 members. Mark asked if I’m a climber. It sounds like lots of people chicken out about half way up when climbing the tower. When studying for my license, I didn’t commit a lot of the tower stuff to memory, since I didn’t expect to be involved in that sort of thing.

Ham Fest in York

SPARC will be at the Ham Fest in York with some “ham junk” for sale. Ralph, from Radio Shack, bought Souders’ small hardware business, so he’ll have all those small accessories there. Testing will be available at the Ham Fest on a walk-in basis.

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When I first started with the X6100, I’d see some noise that buried real signals when plugged into AC power.

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I visited the K3IR tower site for their Elmer Night. People were configuring cameras and testing an ultra-portable FT8 setup:

• truSDX radio
• ft8cn on a phone
• very lightweight wire antenna and transformer kit
• an inexpensive, but super-long, fishing pole as a mast

(Now I need one of those fishing poles.)

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17 people attended the net.

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I drove out to West Chester yesterday, but I’ve not bothered looking up and adding repeaters for the area. Instead, I could set the spectrum analyzer on the UV-K6 (or K5) to scan the 145MHz-148MHz, stepping on 5.00kHz, and I had a pretty good picture of any repeaters to hear out there.

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I’m listening to the April Tower Drill of Lancaster ARES. They seem to be roving around the county and contacting each of the repeaters to log a signal report at higher and lower power levels, especially down to HTs.

From the ARES page, I discovered a new repeater to add to my scan list: W3AD at 145.39 PL 118.8.

We had some time in West Chester to visit Ben and see the new Mini Countryman, so I stopped by Ridley Creek State Park to activate. I had lots of tangles trying to toss my 21.56m EFRW into a tree – it took 30 minutes just to get started, but I had the wire at least 25 feet into the air. I operated FT8 and FT4 on 10m from a pavilion. [Read More]

On the good old 12.5m EFRW, I’m trying 10m FT8 this morning. It’s going nowhere. 15m is much better.

Chasing Hawaii

I have ham-alert for anyone in PA, NJ, or MD spotting the Hawaii DXCC. I’ve been chasing Hawaii around over to 17m and other bands as they pop up, but I didn’t seem them much. It’s the last state I need of the 50.

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Matt and I ran to Erie, PA to watch the eclipse, and activated US-1402, Presque Isle State Park before eclipse. 10m was a bit slow, but I got there on FT8. I ran my 71-foot (21.65m) EFRW sloped up into a nearby tree from our station on a picnic table.

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