Hf

I went to the 985 breakfast and chatted lots of Vic and Jerry.

After breakfast, I hit the parks for some POTA. I started at Middle Creek where I tested my EFHW vs the Tactical Delta Loop.

Next, I setup at State Game Land 156 down the road with the telescoping antenna for a CB walkie talkie.

I encountered a bug using the ATU on R1CBU 0.29.2. I had lots of tunings very near each other, so it switched a lot. It queries and uses the nearest tuning to current frequency, so lots of close tunings will cause thrashing as you move. I cleared the atu table in params.db to alleviate the problem for a bit.

I reconditioned my HF antenna. The SWR was being wonky and variable on the 107ft EFRW: jumping to 3:1 with tuner. I cleaned up the wire ends and alligator clips with sandpaper, reconnected them, and repositioned the counterpoise. Now I’m seeing 1.5:1 SWR with the tuner.

The rope came undone at far end of my EFRW. I had to fish it back down with a wire hook stuck in a fishing pole.

The SWR was a bit high, and I found broken wires in 9:1 balun, so I stripped the wires and reassembled it.

With the antenna working again, I contacted New Caledonia on 10M FT8 with 8W.

The new 107-ft (32.6m) EFRW in the backyard is doing OK, and I’m getting pretty lucky with low power on 10M FT8.

• Japan (10500 km): 5W, 2025-02-10 2245 UTC
• Norfolk Island (14000 km): 2W, 2025-02-11 2238 UTC

I activated US-9719 Susquehanna Riverlands. The tempurature was decent, though a little bit of a mist. I got lots of practice throwing very high in the tree. I used all my throw line to hoist my EFHW into the air. Some people lingered to watch while I struggled to get just the right branch.

I found a large section of coax was bad, so had to scramble a little to get enough cable. I worked 20M to get 2 CW park-to-park contacts and 28 more FT4 contacts

I watched a video about NVIS NVIS achieves 75-90 degree take-off, very vertical, and about a 400-mile range. It can get you over obstacles. It’s most effective on 40m and 80m.

To build it, mount a dipole 1/8 wavelength above ground, horizontal. Add a reflector almost on the ground, 5% longer, to keep the ground from absorbing the signal.

I did a bit of the ARRL 10m Contest all in CW. I keyed with my 3D-printed iambic paddle but relied on the X6100 to decode incoming signals for me.

I made 13 contacts across 10 states/provinces in 4 ITU zones. I used the Web2Cabrillo website to type up my handwritten logs and produce a Cabrillo file to submit to the contest.

I found the brand new wsjtx-improved available on my Debian unstable system. It’s the next beta plus some UI enhancements including filters, color, etc, better location labels.

This weekend was the FT Challenge.

I made about 112 contacts over 14 unique “letter grids”. I operated QRP (<5W), single operator, single radio. We scored points for each contact plus each 3000km distance on a contact, and the multiplier was that number of unique letter grids. I uploaded my logs, and it’ll probably be a while until I see an official score, but I figure I probably got about 2000 points.