My Week in Ham Radio
- Built and deployed a
1/4 wave ground plane with radials
- wire soldered to an UHF chassis plug
- fed from the bottom
- hung in a tree by cord
- York Hamfest and 2 parks out that way
- Codorus
- Sam Lewis
- EFRW
- Mostly ft8
- 40m hot at 5:30pm
- 2 phone contacts in Canadian parks for park-to-park QSO
- Took some time to experiment a little
- Fishing pole mast with 3D-printed fork on the end to catch the wire
- Stop pulling on coax…loosened ends
- SPDX RTTY contest (Poland)
- 2 contacts
- ended at noon UTC on sunday, so ran out of time
- AubsUK firmware for Quansheng
- 10 scanlists
- automatic scan on power-up, feature request
- Picked up a new podcast: Ham Radio Workbench
- Simplex Net: heard 16 of the 38 people
My Questions
- with nicer weather and time to experiment with antennas,
how would you recommend iterating and experimenting?
I have:
- the QRP transceiver
- digital modes & pskreporter
- nanovna
- some modeling software I could learn
- the latest ARRL Antenna Book
Discussion
- Dipoles, sloped or flat?
- Flat leaves nulls toward the ends
- Sloped fills it in to be a bit more omnidirectional
- An antenna close to the ground is going to be NVIS
- Vertical is omnidirectional
- Ron’s seeing infinite SWR on the “screwdriver” antenna.
- Others have had problems as well.
- Mike wonders about viability of using 6m FM in his area
- My Question:
How should I evaluate and structure
my experiments with antennas?
- Conditions change constantly
- Learn to read solar data
- Take notes on conditions and try to test in similar conditions
- Vic’s experiments:
- endfeds
- hamsticks
- radials
- aluminum screen or faraday cloth for ground plane
- WSPRnet and pskreporter help gauge how you’re getting out
- See what you can hear
- Qualify callsign for different tests, so I can tell them apart
in pskreporter:
kc3wwc/a,kc3wwc/b, etc
- Ken wonders about TNC for packet radio on HF/VHF
- Glenn, N3MEL would be the person to contact
- We heard lots of interference and doubling in the beginning of the net
- This was likely another manifestation of intermod
- Tropospheric ducting happens more in morning in the summer