WK4DS Amateur Radio Blog
Elecraft T1 Antenna Tuner Review: Field Testing with 41' EFHW at DeSoto State Park POTA
I wanted to put the Elecraft T1 automatic antenna tuner in “remote” location mode to experiment a little with it. This meant placing it at the antenna feed point (that is the BNC to Banana plug adapter you see below. I simply tied the 41’ wire to the red and the 9’ counter poise wire to the black and then ran a COAX from ABR Industries to the radio. I like this coax as it has the common mode choke preinstalled so I dont have to add my other one to the system.
I finally bit the bullet and bought me one of these amazing little tuners! The Elecraft T1 automatic antenna tuner is a marvel of modern engineering and I dont know why I waited so long to get one. I took it with me today to test out and see if it would do what I needed…
Today saw me at DeSoto State Park which is located atop Lookout mountain in the NE corner of Alabama. This park is beautiful an was built during the Great Depression by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and most of that stone work is still there today. The photo below shows the original entrance to the park and the stone work at the entrance is still there. Today, you enter the park from a different road for most stuff but this road it still open to use and I love going this way just to see these vintage masonry works.
If you are interested in learning more about this park just follow this link to the State park website.
Once on location, I set out to put a 41’ random wire into the nearest tree to the truck so I could tune it to all four bands in the Penntek TR35 radio if I wanted to and kept me from having to dig out the hamsticks and all that hardware. I tied the lower support rope to the door handle of the truck them threw the line over the limb I am pointing to in the above photo and got almost all of the antenna in the air before getting into the branches. It was not shorted to anything, but it was in the branches so I was glad to have a tuner handy to dial it in.
I wanted to put the Elecraft T1 automatic antenna tuner in “remote” location mode to experiment a little with it. This meant placing it at the antenna feed point (that is the BNC to Banana plug adapter you see below. I simply tied the 41’ wire to the red and the 9’ counter poise wire to the black and then ran a COAX from ABR Industries to the radio. I like this coax as it has the common mode choke preinstalled so I dont have to add my other one to the system. This cleaned up the install greatly, but did create one little problem… I had not made up a remote “tune” switch yet so I had to get creative with the tuning process. Since the whole thing was on the truck bed cover, I was able to get the CW key over to the tuner so I could key the transmitter and hit the tune button at the same time.
I already have a plan on making a cable that will allow me to tune the antenna remote from the radio in the future.I will share that once I get it put together, but rest assured that it wont be a long time…lol.
I setup the whole shebang today with my homebrew S meter and the auxiliary system box I made up for the Penntek. You dont know how hard it is to get the display to show the whole frequency during the daytime with an iPhone. HaHa. The refresh rate and the shutter speed are so different that you have to time it to get the whole number to show up. You can see the Elecraft T1 in the background where I had it tied to the antenna. You can also see how I have just slid the key over to tune it for the next band change as well. If you will simply plug the paddle into the straight key input, one of the paddles will act like a straight key allowing you the key the transmitter for tuning purposes.
To be honest, I have used this input in the past when I was trying to use a cheap eBay paddle I had bought to test out for travel. One arm literally broke off and I laid it on it’s side and used the other paddle like a straight key to finish the activation. You do what you gotta do I guess…
Another thing is that it finally turned off cold here. it took it till mid November to find us, but winter is here now and it was kind of all at once too. Like last week it was in the high 60s and low 70s and now it is in the 20s and 30s all day. The cloak in the sun is wonderful though and will keep me warm just fine for things like this. This cloak is make of wool so it is incredibly warm and can quickly become too much if I am active much at all.
Today also saw the deployment of the Gemini travel key as the Penntek has two keyer memories and I dont need the PicoKeyer to work this radio. I could still use the PicoKeyer if I just used the straight key input, but the internal memories do all I need and I like have them in the radio. It just makes the whole system smaller an more compact.
I know that I failed to number the contacts, but this is because I had such a strong run on 20 meters and didn’t have time to write down the numbers. It is over 40 contacts and that is a great day for me in the field! Once I moved to 17 meters I could have wrote them in, but at this point I didn’t see any reason to start so I just omitted them this time. It didn’t matter as I still have a great time and the hunters seemed to enjoy the day too. Thanks for following along and a I hope to see you again soon!
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72
WK4DS
Two days- Hamcation and two POTA parks!
Well, it has been two quite long days to be honest and I am tired while I type this up. BUT, it has been incredible to say the least. I have heard about Hamcation for years, but I have never actually been able to attend until now. I will also be honest and say that I was not prepared for what I found, nor did I really expect to find what I found as well.
Of course, I am leading with a photo of me and Tony N3ZN as he makes wonderful Morse code keys, one of which I have and use for my POTA activations routinely. It is always good to catch up with Tony if I have the opportunity. Shameless unsolicited plug – if you are looking for a really high-quality Morse code key, then this is a wonderful place to look, just saying.
Every organization you could imagine was represented at Hamcation. People from the ARRL as well as the Long Island CW club were there, among others such as AMSAT and the local boyscouts troops and so on.
Some notable things that caught my eye were this giant double Tarheel adjustable dipole seen above, as well as the full line up from Flex Radio as seen below. Well, this is the Maestro control head but they had everything they offer up and running so you could play with them. These are some really nice machines to be honest about it. The display is also a touch screen so that is why there really isnt a need for a ton of panel mounted buttons. I do like having buttons, but this is me hanging onto legacy machines that the bigger the radio the more features you could cram onto the front of the radio had back in the golden era allowing for easier access to the functions. The Elecraft K4 shown below is the perfect blend of touch screen controls and panel mounted buttons in my opinion.
Now for something that me and Trey started back a couple of years ago. We would search out all the Ten Tec radios to see what all was out there for sale just to see. Well, below are all the Ten Tec radios that I saw in the bone yard. Some are actually marked as parts machines. This is new for me as normally they are marked as working perfectly (whether they are or not LOL). There was one amp that was marked as a project, probably due to failed tubes that are no longer available and would need a fairly extensive modification to use different tubes. It would be worth it though as the filtering in Ten Tec gear is superb.
Anyway I was surprised that this was everything as there were ALOT of vendors setup in the bone yard. Pickings was a little thin for the brand. To be honest, the main brand I saw on the used gear tables was ICOM and then Kenwood right behind ICOM with a few Yaesu and one Elecraft K3 that I remember…
Below is the new Elecraft KH1 pocket HF transceiver. This radio is going to do two things really well. SOTA and travel radio will be revolutionized by this machine. The fact that is is so small that it is basically the size of a modern smartphone and can talk around the globe, has a built in key, battery, antenna tuner, antenna, logbook AND pen is insane! I really like the concept alot.
I did buy a radio though it was not a Ten Tec. I bought the 40 meter QRP radio shown below that was built by the late W9SR(SK). It is a 40 meter monobander and is really old. Once I get home, I will update the cable with powerpoles as I couldn’t find a molex to fit it at the whole show and then I will test it some into a dummy load to get the power and make sure the frequency is still right and then it will goto a park! His brother was selling some items and this was in that lot. I am glad to know some of the history on it and hope it works right so I dont have to spend a lot of time figuring out how it works internally. Lol.
Speaking of POTA… this is how I did Hamcation this year. Teresa and I are actually staying in Tampa for these two weeks so I drove up each day for the show. Arrived about 8 and since I am “media”, could check in and get photos and talk to vendors a little about things prior to the show opening. This is how I got most of my photos of the booths. Then right around noon or so, I would leave and head back towards Tampa and along the way, stop at a POTA site and get in an activation.
The first one I got plenty of photos and was in the shade the whole time and was outside, the second was none of that. HAHA
I love operating from the bed cover of the truck with the N3ZN key and my Ten Tec Argonaut 5 radio with my Hamgadgets Memory Keyer. This whole rig just works so well and is so fun to use.
This is the first park and was a lot of fun. I setup on 20 meters as I wasn’t sure about band conditions and such and didnt want to take too long, but as you can see in the log, that never was a problem. The little Ten Tec Argonaut 5 works like a dream, I easily secured the activation in 30 minutes and was still back home before 6PM.
The next day I did the same thing with my schedule but with a park that was closer to the Interstate exit so I had longer to operate. I only got one photo of this park and it was of these giant birds walking around in the parking area while I worked FT8. These birds are LOUD when they “sing” if you can call it that. They were maybe 15 feet from the truck when they would make the call. Did I mention that it was loud? Good grief that startled me when they did it the first time!
Since there was no shade at this location, I faced the truck away from the sun, rolled down all the windows and setup in the cab where I was out of the sun. I ran the sBitx radio today since I wanted to work some FT8 as well as CW. This worked great as I had the activation in the bag in no time but wanted to work some additional contacts for a while so I went back to FT8 and made several contacts there while I transcribed my log into HAMRS so I can put it on the POTA site.
Notice on the map just how close the pin is to the interstate in the above image. That was a really nice perk to this park, it was easy to get to and not far off my course heading back to Tampa.
The above photo is a dramatization. Lol. This photo is from a different day but it looked EXACTLY like this duri g this activation as well, I just forgot to get a photo since I was in a hurry.
I hopped on 15 meters at this park, being curious as to how it would work and boy did it! FT8 ran really strong and then CW came in for many great contacts and then I worked 8 more FT8 contacts before shutting down the station and heading home. 41 contacts total with several into Europe on FT8 which is awesome! With my time running out, I packed up the radio and headed back to Tampa for supper with Teresa. This was a great weekend for me as I was able to goto the Hamcation in Orlando AND activate two POTA parks as well! How much better can it get???
I hope you enjoyed this little AAR about my weekend at Hamcation. 73
WK4DS
2023 Huntsville Hamfest from the view of a vendor this time!!!
Man time flies! It has already been a year since me and Trey had come over and bought all those military surplus cases and stuff! I cant understand how that has happened…
Anyway, I signed up for a table in the “bone yard” which is indoors at Huntsville, which is nice since it means it is out of the direct sun in August and has air conditioning. Well Trey arrives the day of the event and I already have my stuff int he truck, we just load a couple things he is bringing and we are off.
Side notes: Check out the vintage Ten Tec t-shirt I only get out for this and sometimes Field Day, I am probably the only person alive who still has one. I am also monitoring two ham bands here, our 2 meter simplex frequency and our 1.25 meter simplex frequency, We used both over the course of the day to make contact with friends. Back to the story already in progress…
We get to the convention center right on time and find a huge line of cars waiting to get into the show area. Once we work our way through the line we figure out these people are parking in the underground parking lot and we need to go to the back to unload the truck, well we get out of line, unload the truck and setup in short order. I can tell already it is going to be a good show for me when I can’t even get the truck parked before Trey (who went with the stuff to the table) is already being pummeled by dealers wanting to buy my stuff! This is a good sign!
By the time this photo was taken, the Icom IC 705 and tuner were sold. It literally lasted 5 minutes. this is good as the proceeds from the sale of this radio went to purchase the sBitx radio that I want for POTA instead. I had also already sold one of the two power supplies I took over as well. Common items seem to have went really fast to be honest.
Here, Trey (KG4WBI) Is getting settled in for the long arduous day of minding the table. Also, at this point I still had the Elecraft K1 pictured here as well. More on this radio later.
Once the doors opened, it was a free for all till about lunch time. It was REALLY crowded with so many people that it was hard to imagine the total number of participants. Everybody seemed to have a radio, even the little kids!
Things moved off of the table steadily all morning though and I had high hopes that I would actually achieve my goal of not taking any of it home with me! Each little item, one by one, would get picked up and bought by some enterprising person looking for the find of the day. I was happy to help them too.
After lunch I made my way over to the POTA table and grabbed a photo for the blog, they were pretty busy so I didn’t bother them with my shenanigans but left them to inform the youth about the wonders of ham radio. While out on my stroll I did check on a couple of items I was looking for and stopped to play with the N3ZN keys for a minute as they are SWEEEEET! Then it was back to the grind of tending “shop”…
I continued to see the stuff I didn’t use goto new homes one at a time till I was down to the K1, the Ten Tec 238 tuner and the Comet Antenna Analyzer. Then the strangest thing happened. I had to goto the bathroom. Well, that wasnt really all that odd, but what was happening at the table was. Turns out Josh from Ham Radio Crash Course had sent out scouts looking for a K1 or a K2 and they found mine and told him. He was livestreaming the event too! Well, he finds the table and makes his way over to it to find Trey minding the booth in my absence. You can actually watch his stream and see the whole thing transpire, just fast forward to about the 18 minute mark to see where it all starts.
A little back story here. I love the little K1, it was a favorite of mine for many years and I have used it off and on for that time. I just took a long hard look at the gear in the shack and realized the K1 sits on a shelf WAY more than not and I needed it to goto a good home where it would see more air time. So with a little sadness, I packed it up to goto the hamfest to find a new home. I get attached to things like this way to much and this is an exercise in decluttering my life, I wanted to move out a ton of gear and not just throw it away or such but turn it into something I would use instead. The K1 is just a plain fun radio to use, hence the pain in seeing it leave. I believe Josh will do a wonderful job at this and look forward to seeing the little K1 on his youtube channel soon.
It was great interacting with him and getting to chat for a minute, he took it straight way over to the test bench and had them check it for operation and he was happy it worked as advertised, All of this is also in the livestream…lol.
Then I had one more trek around a little to pick up a few items I have been looking for and actually found. I got a coax and some connectors from the Wire Man, I got the drop-in desk charger for my old Icom HT I have been using lately and it even came with a working radio! So now I have two!!! HAHA, why did I come to the hamfest again??? Then I bought a cable from another cable builder, ABR Industries, and I must say they look really good, I wanted a new coax for my POTA work and he builds his with common mode chokes built into the cable, that is really nice and i am looking forward to testing this cable on the nanoVNA to see how it compares to my homebrew chokes I made.
Then the finale of the day came when I went back over to N3ZN’s booth and talked to him about a small POTA key. The next thing I know, I bought one!
This key is tiny, at about 1.5” by 1.5”, it will be an awesome POTA key. I am going to look into how I plan to use it and expect there to be blog posts coming soon about it. I also got to talk to the man himself while he filed out my ticket on it and he is an amazing guy, I count it as a blessing to have met him. Hopefully we will cross paths again soon. If I get the chance I want to share with him my keys I built back in the day, we talked for a while and he is one of the few people that can actually appreciate the work that went into making them.
In closing I wanted to share a photo of my current dream rig, the Elecraft K4 with or without the amplifier, I just want the radio to be honest. At some point I will upgrade from the aging Ten Tec radios in my shack and this is probably what will replace them. I love everything about this radio and quietly take a peek at it when I am at the hamfest, but for now, there is POTA to do and contacts to make with the gear I have!
PS: All I brought home was the antenna analyzer and the Ten Tec tuner, both of which I dont mind holding on to for a while longer…
73
WK4DS-David
One tough activation!
You know the conditions are bad when you cant get a single call on 20 meters…
Today was supposed to be like any other day when I do parks on the air but instead things went horribly wrong well almost horribly wrong. You see I was going to ride over to Cloudland Canyon and get a quick activation and then run some errands and do a YouTube video for my photography channel but I ran into a small problem or three.
So let’s get into this. I had figured that I would simply go to the Sittons Gulch entrance and park in the lower parking lot as I had done many times in the past. That part went fine. I get to the parking lot and to my joy there is no one there at all. This allows me to pick the spot that I want, which is the very first space, as I can rig my counterpoise out-of-the-way so that other people can park all the way across the parking lot.
While I was stringing up the antenna system and getting it ready to connect to the radio I noticed some of my old friends from last summer showed up as well. The mosquitoes were already starting to show up this early in the year, so I got out my bug repellent and sprayed the exposed parts of my body, my neck and hands, and got back to work.
Today I used my friend‘s (KV9L), Elecraft KX3 transceiver and had the antenna system up and running within minutes. This is where the problems began. You see I started with 20 m because 20 m has traditionally been a band that I would secure a activation with relatively quickly usually within 10 to 15 minutes I would have enough calls in the log for a official activation.
Well today would be different as it took me a long time to get an activation at all and none of it was on 20 meters. So I set up the radio and called CQ for about 10 or 15 minutes with zero answers. Literally nobody answered me for 15 minutes at all. This was demoralizing to say the least as I always get a contact or two on 20 meters. CW is usually a really good mode when band conditions are tough as you can still hear the other station pretty well. I could hear other stations, but I do not think they could actually hear me as the signal reports on the reverse beacon network were very low. So I moved to 40 m and actually started getting some traction but it still took me a while to get the 10 minimum contacts to get an activation.
As you can see by the extensive notes in my logbook that day it did not produce very much results, but right at the end as I was about to shut down the station and go to do my errands and I had two more stations called me really quickly, so I ended up with 12 contacts on my trip today to Cloudland Canyon.
Above is what my operating position looked like this morning and I always enjoy doing activations where I can be outdoors like this. It is just plain good fun to be able to set up my radio on the back of the truck and just make contact with people all over the world with just a few watts of power. If you have never attempted to do CW or QRP radio operations I highly recommend it as it can be a very, very rewarding mode and power output level to operate in, just be prepared for the potential of not making many contacts lol.
I want to take a minute to thank my friend Aaron (KV9L) for loaning me his Elecraft KX3 transceiver, I have always wanted to play with one. I have never had the opportunity until you loaned me yours. Thank you very much for that! Now if I can just figure out how to keep it… ha ha ha
Activating a park in Hawaii with with the Elecraft K1
I will be honest here, I thought this would be easier…
Let me explain. You see first off, I live on the east coast of the mainland USA where getting an activation completed or even dozens of QSOs in an activation, is rather easy even at QRP power levels. I have done activations with 4 watts and once I think it was only 1 watt. But someone joked in the past, “that is because you are where all the HAMs are at!” Nothing could be truer as I found out.
So here is the setup for the opportunity. We decide after some travel plans fall through, to goto Hawaii (the big island) for a week or so. This is two fold, we want to see the active volcano as that is a bucket list item for us and it is warm in February…which is always a plus. Well, I talk to the wife and come to the conclusion that there will be time to do a park or two while we are there as well. So I start figuring out what radio to bring.
Just read the previous blog post to see what I brought and why (spoiler, it is the Elecraft K1). So once I figured out the radio and storage/travel bag, I started looking for parks on the POTA app.
We are staying in the town of Hilo so I naturally started looking near there for possible parks. My criteria was that I wanted a park that wasn’t blocked by mountains or in a canyon, preferably one near the beach (I mean, who doesn’t want to do an activation on the beach???) and has a tree to allow me to get the antenna up as close to vertical as possible. This last part is going to be the biggest challenge I would come to find out. Since I packed only wire antennas in my kit, I would need something I could throw a line over to haul up a wire with.
Well, the first park I chose was not really suitable as it didnt have any trees near the parking lot and also no tables nears the trees that are there. The next problem showed up on day two and lasted till almost time to leave…the rain… seems Hilo is a literal rain forest and I failed to do the proper research to learn this ahead of time. Maybe I was not supposed to know this so I would take my gear, I don’t know either way, but it rained 14” of rainfall in a 36 hour period of time at one point. yes, FOURTEEN inches fell in a 36 hour period… The rain was near continuous for many days. Well, on day four, we had about 3 hours to kill in the afternoon so I looked at a park in Hilo proper, it is down by the beach and runs all the way down the the royal gardens. I drove by it and scouted the area and found some trees that would hold a wire. This is park number K-6407 (Wailoa River State Recreation Area) and basically it fit all the criteria.
This is where it gets messy… I decide to give it a try as it is a good time of day to reach the west coast of the US. Grey line would be coming across the US for the next few hours and I need all the help I can get with my measly 7 watts. The only problem is that the rain is coming down in sheets at this point… where to setup??? I opted for the car.
So I get out in the deluge and throw a line over a nearby tree and haul up the antenna which turned out to be more of a sloper this time than a vertical. This antenna is a 41’ radiator and a 13’ counterpoise and is almost resonant on the 40 meter band. I roll the window down a little and run the counter poise and radiator into the car and hook then to the radio.
Once the radio was connected I tried to run the car for the heater and power port only to find it was producing a significant amount of rf hash that the little Elecraft radio couldn’t handle. So I got out the battery and shutoff the car. This actually worked really well, I could hear much better and the car was actually quite warm so I and Teresa were happy. Yep, she sat with me in the car and read a book which I worked you guys on HF.
The next problem I ran into was the contest… I had no idea there was a contest running this weekend and had planned around that literally zero… Well, now what? I went to where I couldn’t hear anyone and started calling CQ and called for ten straight minutes with no answers.
You can see in the log that I got on the air and spent ten minutes finding a clear frequency and called CQ for probably 20 minutes before giving up and moving to 17 meters. Now remember that the whole time this is happening that it is pouring rain. So I am starting to lose hope…
17 meters proved to be MUCH more productive. I found a clear spot tuned up and went to work. Here it still took several minutes of calling for people to hear me. I am going to guess they swung their beams around to me as some of them came booming in to my little wire in the middle of the ocean! I was starting to get somehwere when it seemed my band opening on 17 just stopped so I tried the 30 meter band in hopes of getting something there but no one replied. Next I figured I would give 20 meters another try. I went fairly high in the CW area to get away from the contesters and it seemed to work. I did get a couple of contacts, but it was at this point that I had to pack it up so we could go to the airport to pick up our daughter who was flying in… with 7 QSOs in the log. I really wanted to get this activation and as fate would have it, I started right after the new UTC day began so I actually had time. This was the most difficult hour and half of my POTA life thus far. I had netted 7 contacts in over 90 minutes of air time…I had not anticipated this. Normally, due to the spot page, I get an activation in short order. I have a new appreciation for Hawaii call signs now that I could not have before.
The next thing that happened was fate working in my “POTA” favor. You see the airline let Sierra wait in Maui for an extra two hours due to issues with the gates in the airport. So since the airport in Hilo is 10 minutes from this park I was activating, we just drove back over to the park and I found a better tree to get the wire almost completely vertical this time.
Launching into the “second session” I got on 30 meters hoping to get something there but nobody answered me after quite a while. So I just moved back to 20 meters and again went high in the CW portion. I have never went to 14080 mhz before so I wasn’t sure how this would work. It worked fairly well to be honest, as I got my activation completed during this time part of the time!!!
Since I had my 10 QSOs finally, I wanted to try and work someone on every band I could use on the radio which meant moving down to 40 meters for a while. I finally worked NA7C in Utah on 40 meters with just 7 watts!!!!! I also learned from the RBN that my K1 needs to be aligned. It was consistently off frequency by at least 200 hertz.
So for this trip I took the Gemini travel key as I really like the form factor of this key for these kinds of operations. It is the perfect size and design for ops where there is no surface to set the key on. Also take notice how my trousers are still very wet from stringing the antenna up in the tree. Lol. I wondered how much signal I was losing to the rain… The logbook is a mess because of the terrible band conditions and me making tons of notes about the activation.
Take a look at my original spot note. Lol I had a big idea there!!!
I was also hopeful when I saw the RBN pick me up. So I knew my signal was propagating out to the mainland. You can understand then why I was getting worried when I got no calls for all that time I was calling CQ on 20 meters…
Here you can see my RBN spot on 17 meters as well. It was weak, but it spotted from two different regions. Check that out. But it was during this time that people actually start hearing me and answering!
I was really impressed by some of the signals too. These people have wonderful radio stations and they are my heros to be honest. Below is a spot from the second session of when I had a couple more hours due to the fight delays and was able to finish the activation.
The QSO map looks a lot like I thought it would other than I didn’t expect the mid west and eastern contacts at all. I also figured on a few Japan contacts to be honest, I really thought I would get a couple with how active the Japanese people are in POTA. I only heard a few “J” calls the whole time and none of them could hear me. So when I was spotted by 5W1SA in Samoa then again by VE6WZ in Canada I was just sure I would get some Japan calls, but nothing. Figures. Maybe I did the grey line wrong…who knows.
So when I wrapped up the activation, the antenna was drowned and when I got back to the room I spread all of it out to dry. Note it took more than one day to dry since it rains here almost nonstop and the humidity wont let the stuff dry very fast. It probably won’t be done drying ít till I get home.
Well, that is the story of my activation from the isle of Hawaii while I was on vacation. Thank you for reading along and now go have some fun! What is your most insane story about an activation? Leave me a comment below and let’s have some fun.
The simplest radio and antenna setup I know of…
Ok, first the setup. I get the opportunity to do some ham radio on the big island of Hawaii. It is with about a two week notice and we are flying. Of course, I have this primal fear of my check baggage not making it to the destination with me or ever for that matter. So I have to carry my radio in my carry-on bag… with me. This bag has to house the radio, power source, antenna and any accessories I need as well, such as CW key, headphones, etc. The other bag will have my camera gear so it is pretty much full already. I will balance the load to get everything in those two bag though.
This is the little radio I finally decided on, the Elecraft K1.
So now you understand what I can take is a small QRP radio with a simple wire antenna and some sort of battery. It will be a cw rig, which typically perform better at QRP power levels anyway. At least this is what I have seen when attempting to work POTA with SSB at 10 watts… The radio I initially chose was the Penntek TR-35. It is really small and has all the bells and whistles I like to have on a POTA outing (which is what I plan to do while there) and I just plain like this little radio. I started immediately working on a resonant antenna for it so I could fore go the tuner and quickly realized that wire antennas are not really reliable for resonance without a lot of extra effort on site. Moving the wire around will change SWR. At least it did while I was experimenting with radiators the other day. I spent several hours with my nanoVNA and an EFHW and found I could easily get the SWR maladjusted by simply moving the counterpoise so I have some more homework to do on that before I am up to speed on that kind of antenna.
This is the situation so far, so now what do I do. Well, the solution is to use a different antenna and that means either bringing a tuner or some other kind of antenna that is more bulky. Well, due to space constraints, I chose to use a different radio.
Backing up and punting, so to speak, I chose the Elecraft K1 and a random wire antenna. The K1 that I have, has an internal antenna tuner that the TR-35 lacks so I don’t have to contend with getting the antenna just right once on location. This is a huge bonus since now I dont have to deal with possibly having something happen to the antenna and not being able to get an activation. I can tune just about anything with the K1.
So what does the kit look like now? I have the following:
Elecraft K1 (4 band radio with ATU)
Gemini travel key
41’ random wire with various radials
(8)AA battery pack for remote power. Emergency backup.
Small earbud headphones
Messenger bag style carry bag to house the goodies. (Peak Design Everyday Messenger)
Notebook and pens for logging
Throw line and weight to get antenna in the trees
Misc. little widgets like the BNC to screw lug adapter and a power cord for the cigarette lighter socket in the car.
8Ah LiFePo4 battery with charger.
There is probably a few more little items I have not mentioned here but you get the idea. This will allow me to setup a QRP CW station and work some epic DX stations that I normally dont hear at my home QTH. At least that is what I am hoping for…maybe I will actually be able to work some of those Japan calls I keep seeing in the evenings! Now I have worked QRP for a long time and I am fully aware that I may not even hear the next island, it is the nature of the beast. But I can usually squeak out at least the ten needed for an activation. So I am hopeful that it will work out. The only caveat is that I will have 2000 miles worth of ocean in basically every direction so the take off angle of my antenna is really important. I am hoping there will be a tall tree so I can get it as vertically oriented as possible. This will give me my best shot at getting an activation.
Oh, to be honest, I am pretty sure that this is not the simplest radio I have ever had, but for a portable system that will cover multiple frequencies effectively, the Elecraft K1 works really well. I really think this rig is a great combination of features and it is sad that Elecraft no longer makes this radio. If you love QRP then I can recommend this little radio…as long as you can live with just 4 bands and CW…which I can.
So there you have it, the radio going to Hawaii… wish me luck!
A super cold (for me) POTA CW ham radio activation
Well today was super cold to me after spending a month in central Florida. It was 29 degrees and the wind was howling at park K-2169 (Cloudland Canyon) back in NW Georgia!!! I didn’t let that stop the ham radio bug in me from getting out in the cold and activating a POTA site!
I thought to grab a selfie to remind me of how dumb I was to get out in this cold weather so maybe I would think better of it in the future…probably not, but it was worth a try. You can see how I have the door open on the truck, I was using it for a wind break to keep the crazy gusting winds from freezing me solid with wind chill. That is why I logged in the back seat instead of on top of the bed cover which is my preferred location if I am using the truck for ops.
The weapon of choice today? The Elecraft K1 (4 band version with 40, 30, 20, &17) My particular machine also has the internal antenna tuner as well. I guess you could say it has everything other than the internal battery. This is my second copy of this tiny machine, but I have had a long love affair with these little radios. I sold the first one and literally missed it the day i shipped it off. It only took me a few years to find another one like the first one and get my little grubby paws on it…this time for keeps. Of all my QRP rigs, I place this one VERY near the top.
In the photo below we see the Elecraft K1 as seen from the top, I have placed the BNC to screw lug device on the antenna output of the radio and connected the antenna and counter poise directly to the radio with no feedline at all. I did this on purpose to test the system like this for a upcoming project I want to use this radio for in this configuration. This allows me to see how effective it is with a very minimalist rigging. I am wanting the whole thing to be as minimal as possible and still reach the west coast if possible. You see, I have a week in Hawaii and by the time you read this, I should have been there and returned with at least one activation from the Big Island of Hawaii under my belt… only time with tell.
The below photo shows how I took the tension off of the radio with the wire antenna once I strung it up into the tree next to the truck. This is a modified version of a knot we used in the Boyscouts called a taught line hitch. It works REALLY well on tent ropes for tensioning them to the stakes, it also works really well for tying a small cord to the antenna wire to make it to where you can tie it off to something near the radio as well. If you look above at the photo of the front of the radio, you can see the other end of the cord tied to the top cover ring on my bed cover. This end of the cord is tied to the truck with a bowline knot so it can be undone easily when I finish the activation.
Below is the only photo I have ever been able to get of the wire itself and it actually show up in the photo well enough to be meaningful. I threw a line up into the tree and pulled this wire up about 25 feet off the ground with the throw line and it worked really well. I know this is really low for a wire this long, but I was frozen and in a hurry and didnt want to rethrow the line to try and get it higher in the tree. So I used what I had.
OK, so here is the part where I talk about the antenna that I used. This antenna is simply a random wire right at 41 feet long and the counter poise is 13’ long. These are technically not supposed to be resonant on any of the 4 bands I have in this radio, but as it turned out today, the antenna was almost perfect on the 40 meter band with it arranged near the truck body. (it was reacting capacitively with the truck as I could change the SWR by literally moving the counter poise closer or further from the truck. It would also change the resonance of the antenna too, so I used the internal tuner to be safe) I used this to my advantage and worked quite a few 40 meter contacts today. I also cut counter poise wires for the other three bands and plan to set them up and see what the nanoVNA says about them when I have time. Something else I have learned to do over time is to put the wire length flags on the wires. This is simply little pieces of paper with a large number written in sharpie on them and then taped on with a long piece of packing tape to basically laminate them into place. This makes it really easy to know which wires you have without having to guess. All of this wire is high flex, silicone insulated wire and is basically tangle free for the most part, where has this wire been all my life??? Turns out it was on Amazon all along…
Another item I have fallen in love with is these little Velcro cable straps, I don’t know why I didn’t get these sooner, but these things are a wonder of modern technology for wire management and keeping your gear organized. If you have never used them, I highly recommend grabbing a pack of them off of amazon, it will change your life!
So, since I had a way to wander off of 20 meters, wandered I did! I didnt get on 20 meters at all today. Today I stayed on the other three ham radio bands that I could get on and got 16 contacts in about 45 minutes even though it was super cold and I had the power, on the first two QSOs, turned down to 1 watt! Yes, ONE watt! Now, they are only a few hundred miles away to be fair, but still, it is a single solitary watt going the distance here! AA5JF was a little over 200 miles from me and he heard me really well if his signal report is accurate on that little single watt of RF power. The other person (W4EDN) was 265 miles away and I still got a good report. This just goes to show that you don’t need really big guns to have some fun with radio, it is something that even people who can only get small QRP kit rigs and build them can make some contacts. Now, would have I made more with more power? Of course I would, more people could have heard me and I am not contesting that. My point here is people seem to get it in their head that you need 100 watts to be able to have a QSO on HF, when it just ain’t true. Now, I cant speak of phone contacts here as I don’t do very much HF amateur radio on phone modes, I am almost exclusively a CW op…hence the love affair with the K1. So take all that with a grain of Morse code… Once I remembered I was running 1 watt, I noted it at the top of the log and turned up the power to 7 watts (I thoguht I would see how the signal reports changed with 7 times the output power and the log speaks for itself. The first report on each line is what I sent them and the second report is how they heard me. Once I moved to 17 meters I turned the little K1 to 5 watts and left it there for the rest of the activation.
It was easier for me to get some Park to Park QSOs today with the “hunt and pounce” method…but it was more like the “hunt and wait till they can hear me” method actually, all the joking aside, it worked and I got three parks in the log today because of it. I didn’t keep the activation going any longer as I had some chores to do as well as my feet and fingers were getting numb. Numb fingers and toes makes it hard to log and send decent code so I went QRT with 16 QSOs in the logbook for today. All in all, it was a successful trip with me testing all three of the other bands I don’t normally use and the random wire turned out to even be resonant on the 40 meter CW band somehow. What luck! Maybe future me will have written about how my trip to Hawaii was successful and you will see that blogpost in a couple of weeks once I have had time to write it. So till next time, go get your radio out and take it to a part or something.
The Elecraft K1 goes out for a POTA activation!
So I finally got my Elecraft K1 out of mothballs and took it for a spin to K-2169 the other day. (I actually have already used it once before but had put it back in favor of the IC-705 as it has more widgets and such.. Anyway, I finally just bit the bullet and took it with me to my favorite shady location at K-2169 and setup for some “on air” fun.
The one thing I like about the K1 is that it has an internal antenna tuner installed. This simplifies the set up and breakdown of the radio at the location by eliminating the entire external antenna tuner connection series of events.
I am running two 10’ counter poises at this time, mainly because I have them and it seems to help to have both connected. I want to run my VNA over them to see what it looks like with one and then two at some point.
This one simple thing alone saves me an easy five minutes of set up time. So it was fun for that fact alone but the other things that make the K-1 unique are that it is such a simple radio to operate as well. I like that the VFO works really well and the radio has enough controls to do everything you need while on an activation and nothing more.
Another thing that I like about the K-1 is that the headphone jack is wired for stereo headphones from the factory. This seems like a trivial thing but with the 705 and the TR 35 they are both factory wired for mono headphones or one ear only listening. This is not what I enjoy using therefore I either have to buy a adapter or figure out some kind of bizarre wiring scheme to get both ears to have signal on those two radios, but on the K1 just works.
I keep my K-1 in the original aluminum briefcase that I have had for over 20 years now. The radio and accessories have fit nicely in it for all of this time. I do carry the 705 backpack kit when I activate with it because the EFHW antenna that I am using is in that bag. Rather than pull stuff from one bag and put it in another I just take both and pull what I need from each one. I do like you using the N6ARA paddle that I have with my 705. It works really really well and I am probably going to get a second one for a spare when I wear this one out.
Yes, I did make that key you see in there. It is made from scrap industrial materials and works exceedingly well to be as simple as it is. I love making some of the things that I use on the air and my keys are one area where I do that. At some point I want to build a radio from scratch, but I have no time right now to dedicate to a project of this magnitude, so I will just stick to the simple stuff and have fun on the air.
Getting back to the activation I was kind of in a hurry that day so I hurriedly threw my throw line over the first large tree branch to get my EFHW in the air and it took me four attempts to get it over that branch which is normally a quick one throw shot for me! ha ha… There goes the whole doing it in a hurry part. Once I got it over that first tree limb then it’s a simple matter of pulling the antenna over that limb re-tying the throw-weight and throwing it into the second tree to pull the final end of the antenna up where this photo shows.
This makes the antenna run about 60° north east when I string it like this but it seems to work really well from this position.
It is no secret that the bands have been terrible lately but I was still able to get 23 contacts in about an hour, maybe a little bit longer, with this activation. This particular activation put me at 19 activations at K2169. I really wanted the Repeat Offender award so I went back the next morning and setup the entire assembly the next day and reworked 14 more contacts to have my 20th activation at Cloudland Canyon State Park. I have been working on this award for quite some time and finally got to the minimum 20 to complete it. Now I think I will start branching out to other nearby parks and activate some of those as well. I will still go to Cloudland Canyon very regularly as it is really close to my home and I can go over there almost any morning for an activation. It is the only park that is within a 30 minute drive of my house that I have available to me. The area I live in is park dense, to a degree, but they are actually spread out somewhat due to the topography of the area.
I am going to wrap up this blog post by saying that if you have not tried parks on the air I would recommend it highly. As well as if you have not tried Morse code, I would recommend that as well. Mainly because both of those are very fun for me… Until next time.
72
David
WK4DS
ARRL Amateur Radio Field Day 2022 After Action Report from a CW op.
Well that fateful day has come and went, fun was had, radios were used and new skills were learned.
I want to thank Ms. Dana K4GCA, for hosting us on her property so graciously, this made the whole event feel so much better. You see, this is our first field day without her late husband Brian (K4GC) who passed away unexpectedly last year. We miss Brian dearly and it made this field day even more special to be allowed to operate the site from his back yard.
This was the first year I have been to a field day event in many years. A lot of new faces have came onto the scene since the last time I did field day with the K4SOD amateur radio club. It was good to see old faces as well as the new ones and to put faces to call signs is always a good thing.
Roger KG4WBI brought several radios and antennas and proceeded to build a huge antenna array on a push-up pole to connect his Ten Tec Argonaut to via hamstick dipoles. I had to leave before the system was built completely and go to church for the evening but when I came back I went back over to the site to operate some CW on the air..
Once things got underway, they setup the SSB station in the back workshop and got to work. Ricky W4EMA getting on the air here on Roger’s KG4WBI Alinco DX77T HF rig while Steve KI4WJG waits his turn at the controls. Thanks to KK4IJR Kevin for many of the photos in this article, but somehow we didnt get a single image of him!!! LOL
It is strange how CW will draw a crowd I did not think most people enjoyed it but it was a huge conversation topic the whole time I was trying to work contacts. The guys were truly interested and it surprised me. I was looking around trying to find contacts with the Argonaut but since it only has 5W of output power it was very difficult to get through the band QRM and make a contact. I spent the better part of almost an hour trying to make five contacts, it was very different from the parks on the air style of operating.
I finally gave in and we used Josh’s KN4RTY Yeasu 891 to up the power output and to get through and make some contacts. At this point my confidence was boosted somewhat and I was able to get back on the Argonaut and it’s five watts of output power and make a few more contacts with it before I called it quits at 2:48 in the morning local time(5:48 UTC).
Getting to use the Argonaut was a special treat as those radios have been out of production for many years maybe even decades at this point. Roger had went to the trouble of having this radio professionally tuned, aligned and cleaned so that it would be in pristine operating condition for the night. Ten Tec transceivers are amazing radios especially for the CW operators. They seem to specialize in that type of radio communications with their transceivers. If you really enjoy using CW in my opinion, you really should look at Ten Tec and Elecraft radios, these radios excel at that mode. Now don’t get me wrong, all amateur radios, pretty much, work really well with CW. It is just a subset of all the amateur radio operating modes so don’t think you have to have a certain brand of radio to use CW, I just prefer Ten Tec radios.
I decided to take two different CW keys with me to the field a side. One was my straight key I made some 20 years ago but since we were using it on the Argonaut 2 I had to change the cable to an RCA cable to be able to connect it to the radio. The other key was my serial number 1 “prototype” WK4DS paddle and I love this key greatly so I put it in a waterproof hard shell storage box with some closed cell phone to protect it during travel. These two CW keys are my primary keys that I use when I work outdoors or sometimes indoor operations. I have others as well, but these are my favorites.
My logbook is a mess! I would get the call first then get their exchange info before even calling them, this way i could listen to the exchange and just confirm what I had written down already. This made code copy at such high speeds much easier for me. You see, I am kinda slow at copy right now… lol…
It was a really good time and I really enjoyed meeting with people that I had not seen in a long time it makes me realize how great this community really is. If you have not gotten out and interacted with the local hams in your area I highly recommend it. Until next time get your radio out and go make a contact with it will see you later 73 WK4DS
Tough conditions, dead batteries and a lot of amateur radio fun.
This is a tale of a guy who thinks he is going to get a “quick” POTA activation and then go grab some photos as well… It didn’t go like that…at all.
You see I thought I had this whole Parks On The Air thing dialed in and have even built a little “kit” to activate parks with that I can just grab and go. I am repurposing an old camera bag (a story for another day) and it organizes the QRP rig perfectly for activations. Soooooo, this is how it goes on that fateful day. I have a few hours in the afternoon on June 8th 2022 and tell the wife I am gonna “run” over to Cloudland Canyon state park and get a quick activation and then be back in time for supper with the kids later. I grab said POTA bag, hop in the truck and head over to my spot to activate K-2169.
Well, I should have heeded the warning when I got there I guess as my favorite location on top of the hill was occupied with a group of teens on a day trip from a local school. I circle through the parking lot really slowly surveying the area and decided to park for a bit and see if I could figure something else out when I catch a break! They start packing up to leave!!! So I wait patiently for them to vacate the location I want to use and once clear, I move the truck and grab my gear.
Setup was frustrating this time as I had to throw my line 7 times to get a good location like I wanted (turned out later that really didnt seem to matter, haha). I FINALLY get the line up in the tree and then hook up the radio and we are off to the races! Well, I was off to the races, seems nobody could hear me. It took several minutes of calling CQ to get my first contact. Normally once I get one, then I will end up with at least an activation (10 contacts) within about the next ten minutes. Not this time, it took a full ten minutes to get the next QSO in the log! So then I figure I would go hunting some other parks and I did get one then another! NO! It was a SOTA op that is didnt hear well… lol. Well after that I got my hopes up again as I got a run of 5 in about 25 minutes. As I would be just about to give up and try something else, I would get another one and it would keep me in place a little longer. So I am an hour in and only have 8 contacts at this point, I need 10 for a technical activation, so I REALLY want to get two more before having to shut down the operation. It was at this point that I realized why I was getting the 339 reports…THE REMOTE BATTERY WAS DEAD!!! I’m thinking at this point. Really doofus, your brought a dead battery to an activation??? Well, yeah, I did… So I am now running on the battery that comes with the 705 which will only produce 5 watts output. I can hear stations but they cant hear me… I head over to 30 meters and bag N3VO for the 9th QSO in the log, it is basically time to break down the rig, but I need one more contact to have an activation, so I go back to 20 meters and switch to SSB, after trying to get through 4 pile ups without no success, I score a park to park on my last QSO of the day and get my 10th contact securing an official activation. This one was close, but I made it, I quickly broke the rig down and headed home…
So if you think you cant make it work, there is almost always a way to do it, even if you have a dead battery and the bands are terrible for QRP and you have to switch modes, you just might get it done.
73
WK4DS