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David Saylors 9/26/26 David Saylors 9/26/26

POTA problems with the TenTec Scout 555

After a solid hour, I got my 4th call. Now what you are not seeing here is the part where I went to 17 meters and called CQ there as well. That was also in that 30 minute block between the third and fourth contacts in the log. I actually thought I would make a few contacts on 17 meters as it usually is open if 20 meters is open.

This activation was very enlightening. I went to US-2169 since it is close to home AND diesel fuel is over $6.00 per gallon currently. I setup at my favorite place in the park, the Frisbee golf parking lot. This place is usually empty on Friday mornings and today did not disappoint. There was one other car that is not in the photo that a group of day hikers exited from and promptly entered the tree line. I never saw them again… I setup in the same spot I like to use, but to be fair, I think I like the spot on the other side of the lot better. This one it the first one I chose, but it really isnt that great for stringing an antenna. I almost have to use the telescoping vertical on the truck mount. The trees near the truck will hold a wire but relative to the truck (read that as to the radio as well) the wire is almost horizontal. This is not ideal for a wire that needs to be above the grade and I assume, the radio…

See what I mean about going on the “off” days? I had the place to myself for the most part. Without another soul in sight I was able to leave the doors open so a breeze blew through the truck and made for a pleasant activation. I setup the TenTec Scout 555 in the passenger seat like I usually do since I wanted to use “truck power” to run my radio. You see, I have a cable fed into the cab of the truck that is directly connected to the battery with a fuse and the other end has a power pole connector on it. This allows me to run my radios in the truck with having to hard wire all of the them. This is nice, but as I found out today, it is also a liability…

I have gotten very comfortable using this station location. As long as I operate by myself, this works almost perfectly for me. I do wish that the armrest could be longer so that I could more easily sit in the seat and log contacts. As it stands I now sit somewhat side ways a little so my arm can work the key with it at the front edge of the arm rest. I have thought about getting a sheet of plywood and covering the back half with cloth and letting it become the surface when I am operating, that would give me a table for the computer as well as the key and keyer. You can’t see the power cord in this photo as it is run under the yellow case, but it is there. At this point, I had already moved to 15 meters after calling CQ for over ten minutes on 10 meters without as much as a chirp coming back to me. I had high hopes too. You see, when I powered up the radio, I had planned on simply hoping on 20 meters and working on an activation since the signal report looked real bad for today, the K Index was a 4 and the bands only showed Fair from 30 through 15 meters and poor everywhere else.

Finally picked up a shorter cable for the nanoVNA to tune the antenna with…

This did not inspire confidence to say the least… But I had the 10 meter band module in the radio so I just hooked it up as it so I could get the circuits warming sooner. The TenTec Scout 555 is a great radio but it had some analog stuff…well…a lot of analog electronics in it and they don’t work properly when they are cold, your frequency will drift while your using it and all sorts of shenanigans. So now, I setup the radio first, get it under power so the idle current can be warming it up and then work on the antenna. I built up the antenna and as soon as I connected the coax, I could hear a station calling CQ! When I looked at the radio, IT WAS ON TEN METERS!!! Ten meters was supposed to be closed right now! Well ,I had just tuned it to 20 meters so back out to the antenna I go with the nanoVNA and tune it up for 10 meters. I get back in the truck and he is still calling CQ! I start answering him and it takes him probably 6 tries to get all of my callsign as I am only running about 40 watts and the band is closed for Christ’s sake. First call in the log today is CX2UI from Uruguay! I am thinking this is about to be a really good day with a lot of calls in the log! Well, it wasn’t. As you can see below it was almost 30 minutes from the first call on 10 meters to the 2nd call on 15 meters… 15 meters was marginally more successful with me landing a whopping TWO calls on that band! Now understand, I dialed up the FT8 watering hole and there were a ton of ops there. If I had brought the sBitx V3 then I could have easily gotten the activation on that mode on ten meters. There was a ton of people there as well. I just wanted to work CW today so I didn’t bring the FT8 radio with me. Constraints like this will make you work harder as it is more of a challenge to get the activation if you dont have easy mode (FT8) available to fill in the gaps. The logbook is upside down as this is a screenshot of HAMRS and that program pushed the call log down and puts the most recent one on top as you go. After nabbing the two calls on 15 meters, it was like the band simply turned itself off to CW use. I tried for almost 30 more minutes to get another contact but nothing was there.

20 meters to the rescue… As you can see, the log is filled out with a lot of 20 meters QSOs. The remains calls only took 40 minutes to get in the logbook. The very last one was a ham that simply answered my call and we had a short ragchew. He also told me that my radio had a birdie or it was chirping when i was sending code. I had noticed that a few minutes into the 20 meter portion I started getting numbers in the 3rd position that were not good. You see, that third number will, pretty much by default, always be a 9. When it is not a 9 then your radio is not working right. I got several in a row with less that a 9 there. That threw me a curve ball as I don’t normally get those kinds of reports. Armed with this knowledge, I took the radio home and connected it to the antenna in my house.

Something I learned from HamRadioCrashCourse on YouTube is that you can dial up these webSDR receivers and test your radio by listening to your signal as it is received by another radio. You are not getting the audio from inside the radio. This is the actual signal that is sent out of the radio, over the air, and heard by another radio. This is the truest test of what your signal will sound like. So I dialed up a portion of the band that had very little use as you can see in the waterfall. Once I found a spot, I adjusted the filter to cut out adjacent signals and then started sending. My signal is the one in the center of the little yellow filter area on the waterfall. The sound coming back to me was perfect too. I listened for a while and it is a little disorienting since there is a delay between you sending and you hearing it. The best way I can tell you to do it is to send your callsign and the word “testing” with the SDR volume turned down and then turn up the volume and sending whatever so you can hear the sound of the signal, and then when your finished, send de Your Callsign and then QRT. It is fine to send a test signal as long as you are not interfering with someone else and you ID your signal. I can not find it anywhere in the rules that this is not allowed as long as you do those two things…well and you know, stay in the allocated band space and don’t exceed the power limits and such as that but you get the point. It is kinda cool to be able to hear what your actual signal sounds like on the air by another radio almost 1500 miles away.

So what did I learn from this today? I learned that the radio isn’t always the problem even if the signal is terrible. Turns out that my cable has a bad connection in it going out to the battery and I was having voltage dips when I would key the radio. I could even see it with the meter lamp dimming on each character during transmit. So I plan to replace that cable with a much larger one on the order of either 10ga. or 8ga copper wire with soon. This and a new fuse holder should get me back up and running in fine order.

Towards the end of the activation, things were all out of sorts and I had to take my time to get it all cleaned up and put away properly. I will usually get out all the band modules I plan to use that day and just lay them on the dash like you see here. it makes it easy to change bands and I can see all of them as well so I don’t lose one in between the seats or something like that. The case for the Begali Traveler key is laying up there with them too, but that just happened to be the best place for it today. It normally ends back up in the carry tote but today it was on the other side of the truck and this was easier…haha. All in all the day went pretty well considering the Sun was mad and I had a radio that was sending trash for code. Moving forward, I plan to make several improvements to the system as a whole and see if the radio will work even better. Have you had a day when there was a comedy of errors to contend with? Today must have been my day as I have not been out since early August to a park at all and I had started to miss it.

WK4DS - David

David Saylors 11/27/24 David Saylors 11/27/24

Ten-Tec Scout 555 POTA: 74 CW Contacts at Raccoon Creek WMA [US-9875]

As you can see from the QSO map above, the bands were alive and well on this day from Raccoon Creek WMA (US-9875). The calls just kept coming in and I finally had to got QRT, with people still calling, and pack up as I had to meet the wife for a dinner date! I normally clear the little pile up I will draw in and then I can simply power down. I really felt bad about having to shut down with stations still calling me. I now know what those rare DX station feel like… It is surreal to experience that to be honest… especially from Alabama.

Today got so fast paced that I forgot how to do CW properly! Let me explain…

You see, today I activated US-9875 Raccoon Creek WMA and I went at a different time of day. I wanted to spend several hours here today as I dont get over to the area often and I wanted to try to get as many contacts as I could in the afternoon. My goal was 60 QSOs today which is way more than I usually worry about, but like I said, this park is a solid 40 minutes in one direction and I dont go this way too often so I wanted to “make it count” if you know what i mean.

I rolled into the WMA at about 14:30 local time and set out to build the radio down by the Tennessee river. This is a small parking lot at the end of one of the gravel roads into the WMA and a lot of locals come to this spot to fish in the river from the shore. Did I mention it started raining right after I got the antenna setup and I got into the truck? Well, let me tell you, the rain set in and it didnt stop the whole time. I even broke down the antenna and stuff out in the rain today!!!

The above photo shows what the station looks like right before I plug all that stuff in and turn the power on. Everything I need to get on the air is in that pile for both SSB as well as CW. To be fair, I can get by without the Picokeyer and the 1/8 mono to 1/8 mono cable and I could simple plug the paddle right into the radio and it would work just fine. So there is really excess here above what is absolutely needed.

I did get the nanoVNA out and look at the antenna to make sure the rain didn’t do something to it like push it out of band due to the conductivity of the wet earth or what ever. Turns out it was just fine… It was a little low with the water on everything but the null was really close to the bottom of the 15 meter band edge so I used it and didnt worry about it. If you will notice, it was only 1.233:1 SWR at the band edge so it was plenty happy and we never checked it again after this on 15 meters. When I switched to 20 meters, the SWR had moved up to about 1.8:1 or maybe it was at 2:1 but I ran it and as you can see in the log, that didn’t seem to matter at all.

I setup shop on 15 meters SSB for a change and wanted to see what I could get before 15 faded out, but I noticed almost immediately that the ALC light wasn’t coming on at all when I would transmit audio. This lamp should just blink on the energy peaks but it wasn’t coming on at all. I messed with the mic gain and nothing. I did notice that I could wiggle the cord at the plug and it would make all sorts of stuff happen. This pointed me to the connector being faulty somehow but workable to some degree.

I made a few contacts with it like this and basically yelling at the radio would barely get the ALC to illuminate. I asked the last person for a report and they told me the audio was muffled and weak. Armed with all this knowledge, I decided to open the connector and see if a wire was broken. Well, they were not broken…but they were also not connected either. There were two cold solder joints from the factory…figures. I got a pretty decent photo of the green wire in the below photo. Well…that shuts down the SSB portion of this activation so onto 15 meters CW!

The 15 meter band has two things that make it unique. It is quieter than the lower bands for me and the “skip distance” is MUCH further with mobile, or improvised antennas. I didn’t make many CW contacts on 15 but check out the locations! Washington state is pretty common for me on 15 meters, in fact the entirety of the western United States is easier for me to work on 15 meters during the day. But a lot of people apparently don’t know this so lots of times the band will be open but there wont be anyone on it. Case in point today, I worked 4 ops in 11 minutes of calling CQ.

After vacuuming the bands of CW ops, I moved to FT8 to see what was happening and this is my “yardstick” of how open the band is. Turns out it was REALLY open! 15 meters FT8 netted a nice dozen contacts and got me almost half way to my original goal of 60 QSOs! This didn’t take long either and just goes to show that the higher bands are great if you will just go check them.

I had switched radios to use the sBitx V4 (I did the software upgrade and got some new features like the color coding of FT8 information you see below) You can also see that I was transmitting with 17 watts too. This is not precise, but it is close and I use it for my logbook notes.

After finishing on 15 meters I moved down to 20 meters to finish out the day. The sun was starting to set at this point and I knew 20 meters would serve me better at this point. after hunting W9XT, I set up shop on a clear frequency and started calling CQ, this is when things got a little crazy. I had a nice little pileup form pretty quick that took me about half an hour to clear, then nothing… It must be band fading at this point as the stations just vanished. I figured I would switch over to FT8 for a few minutes at this point too and see what I could get in that mode. I didn’t mention that I used the sBitx for CW at this point and to be honest, I dont think I will use it for CW seriously till there is a software change to make it work better. If you try to use it much past 18WPM it is like it fights you and induces mistakes for some reason. The people smarter than me in the email reflector seem to think is has to do with how the software scans the inputs on the radio, but I do know it will induce mistakes in your sending if you are not very attentive and send a very specific way. It will work if your careful and go about 18WPM max. I can use a keyboard to send CW but that really isnt all that much fun to be honest.

I struggled with FT8 today on 20 meters for some reason. The QSO could not complete to the 73 so it would not autolog the QSO. It would also not finish the exchange many times either. I could get it to send the signal report then they would send back and they would just get stuck in that step and never move past it. It got really frustrating towards the end, but I did manage to net some contacts here too.

At this point I had made 48 contacts which is a phenomenal day out for me, but I wanted 12 more to have that 60 that I started out my goal with! So at this point I move back down into the CW portion but this time on the Ten Tec Scout 555 instead since the CW mode on it works beautifully.

It took me a couple minutes to switch the radios out and to find a clear frequency and get started, but once I did, it didn’t take long to get a HUGE PILE UP going!!!! I got so excited during this part that I was racing the clock to see how many I could work before having to shut down the radio and go home as I was almost out of time. I started rushing the closing and it was here that I got sloppy with my CW. You see, I normally use QRP power levels for the most part, just the sBitx and the Ten Tec Scout are QRO by the rules and the sBitx is borderline to me. I will usually turn the power down to 5 watts or so anyway to preserve the finals in the radio but today I had the Scout and it is set at 50 watts and is not easily field adjusted from that power level.

As the pile up raged on, I got so lost in the process that I started sending 72 intermingled with contacts getting 73 instead and finally someone stopped me and asked why I am signing both modes and this is when it hit me. I had been running on autopilot about half the time just logging contacts and the muscle memory would just send the 72 and I would not even think about it. I would then called QRZ and get another call, rinse and repeat… Here is the next problem for me. My ragchew copy and my POTA copy are very different levels. He sent me the message at the speed I was working POTA contacts. Your brain will learn how to copy the formatted style exchanges without even thinking about it. I know that I am going to get a two letter state after the signal report and I can copy callsigns really well for some reason up to about 25 WPM, but send me a full sentence question and it breaks my brain. I cant copy half of it without writing it down. I can ragchew comfortably at 18 WPM max at this time, but if you ask me a question about my radio or something that isn’t part of the usual banter in a POTA contact and I am lost… I apologized for this mistake I had been making for probably 20 minutes without even realizing it and it was really close to when I had to leave anyway so I went ahead and called QRT to get the radio put away as it was raining really well at this point too…

To everyone that reads this that I didn’t get to work on this day, I am sorry to have to had shut down the rig and leave, I was having a wonderful time and wanted to stay longer!!!

The moral of this part of the story is dont get in such a hurry that you cause confusion with the hunters, take your time and be sure in what you are actually sending out over the airwaves.

On a brighter note, I got my 60! and 14 more!!! I dont know how long it has been since I got that many calls in the log in one day. Until next time I hope to work you on the air!

Read more Ten-Tec Scout 555 POTA activations:

- [Another Scout 555 POTA post]

- [60m band module series]

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WK4DS - David