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.)

I borrowed a soldering iron and started on my own project: assembling a couple common mode chokes from a short piece of RG174. It got dark quick, so I finished the chokes at home. It was my first time trying to crimp those SMA connectors.

I got a quick tour of all the repeater hardware. There are a lot more services running on these towers than I realized.

17 people attended the net.

My Week in Radio

• POTA: Ridley Creek, east of West Chester
  • 21.56m efrw
  • embarrassing tangle of string, 30 minutes
  • got New Zealand!
• POTA: Presque Isle State Park, Erie PA
  • eclipse
  • 21.56 efrw
  • operated next to my brother, kc3wry from the same picnic table
  • I worked 10m and he worked 40m
  • our data logs will be used my HAMSCI people, University of Scranton
• Caught Pitcairn Island DXpedition, VP6G, on 5w FT8 10m.
  • operating shifted, and was super quiet
  • my first OC
• Operating HT at 5W
  • dipole high in a tree
  • too sensitive for this cheap HT
  • FM bandstop filter to clean up the reception, especially for 985
  • TX though it without any fire!
• Modified the database in my hf radio to mark the bandplan on the waterfall
• started a website for all my notes since october

985 Breakfast on Friday

• Lots of coax, antennas, analyzers, etc for sale.

Halyard on dipole install

• AF3Z, Jim
• Having a full halyard loop of rope to the pulley (like a flagpole) allows you to pull it up or down, whatever is needed.
• Avoids having a pulley up the tree with no rope because an end gets away.

Dipole in the Attic

• KCYYIT, Dave
• Built the fan dipole for 6m and 10m in the attic.
• Tuned it with nanovna
• Not too tricky or ambitious: only the 2 bands.

Mud Mosey

• Event at great marsh institute
• Course marshals used gmrs ch 17.
• 10 ham operators to help coordinate operations.
• Used simplex freq 147.12MHz
• Tom was net control

APRS

• KC3YVQ, Jack
• Does APRS kerchunk N3FYI?
  • We don’t think so. It should transmit and receive on standard 144.390MHz

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.

Once I heard something, I could pop open RepeaterBook on my phone and see what it was, but it saved me lots of trouble programming anything into the radio ahead of time to not necessarily need it.

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.

10m is busy here in mid-afternoon, and I’m reaching south america on 5w. I got Suriname and Cayman Islands on 5w. then 10m maybe died again.

Pitcairn Island DXpedition

I just got the VP6G DXpedetion on 5w on FT8 on 28.0785MHz. That’s my first “OC”! I don’t know why they were shifted, but I saw it on the waterfall on my X6100, so checked it out.

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.

I got some audible screaming on the speaker in addition to the normal clicking when I hit the tuner. I usually have a choke near the radio, and that was missing.

It was cloudy and even some rain in the morning, but it cleared and we saw some blue sky before the eclipse started around 2pm.

Totality was at 3:16pm EDT. I have a video in 360 degrees.

My Week in Amateur Radio

• Overload on UV-K5 with better antennas
  • UV-K5 & UV-K6 for comparison - not broken
  • Balance antenna location good enough but not too good
  • FM bandstop filter helps a whole lot
• Modifying params database on Xiegu X6100
  • Now shows me accurate bands and privileges, so I won’t accidentally wander beyond my privileges.
• Picked up an Evolve 3 laptop that runs on 12v
  • Linux is being challenging: wifi and sound.
• Packing camera and radio gear or eclipse trip tomorrow

I checked into simplex net west again.

I posted to Facebook and got lots of discussion about the FM bandstop filter. When I started adding better external antennas, I could reach further (tx and rx**, but I also found that some VHF frequencies got much worse. It turned out I was overloading the receiver with the strong FM broadcasts in my area and increased sensitivity of the better antenna. I found a bandstop filter helped bring back those signals I was losing. [Read More]