Last updated September 1, 2008
| Volunteer
for the MS Bike Event! |
Need GPS
Files for the ride? MS Bike GPS Files |
| Solar X-rays: Geomagnetic Field: |
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N3KL Solar Activity Monitor |
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Ham
Gear for sale:
http://home.nc.rr.com/ag4xr/AG4XRhamgear.html I have a lot of accessories that I have acquired over time, much of it is still in the original packaging! Check out the link above and see if there's anything you need. |
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Hamfests are a big part of my
hobby
too. I set up at most hamfests in North Carolina, and a few out of
state. Hopefully though, I'll sell off all my extras pretty soon. While
hamfests are fun, I miss the days when I just went to look and buy cool
stuff! Here are my current plans: |
| Status |
Event |
Location |
| Just
finished Shelby, need to check the calendar. |
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| I've been a licensed amateur
radio
operator for over ten years.
Some of my favorite activities include contesting and antenna
construction. Field Day with W4DW is a perennial favorite
activity. If you made a contact on 80 phone with W4DW this year
or last,
I was probably the voice on the other end. ;-) I have a pretty standard station with a Yaesu FT-1000MP for HF, an Icom 970-H for VHF/UHF and the obligatory Icom 706-MkIIG in the car. Antennas are never a constant around here, but I'm currently running an inverted vee trap dipole for 160 - 20 meters, (well, I was for a while, see below) and trying to decide what to do for 20 thru 10. House remodeling is causing me to keep changing the station, but I'll survive. Like every ham, I've accumulated a lot of gear over the years. What's different is that I acquired a stockpile of new in the box accessories a few years ago. If you need something, check out the list at this link Sort of a Blog! September 1, 2008 Getting Ready for the Bike MS New Bern event. September already! The Shelby Hamfest (or was that Dallas?) is history; I wish my sunburn was history too! We expected overcast or rain and got brutal sunshine, heat and humidity! Even with a beach umbrella, I managed a nice little sunburn! Oh well. That was last month. Now, it's September. That means time to get ready for a number of Public Service events. One of the largest in the area is the Bike MS event, formerly known as the MS-150 ride. Now, it is two days of riding in and around the coastal city of New Bern, North Carolina. Ride 30, 75 or 100 miles each day, with different routes on Saturday and Sunday. See the links above for info. (The links will disappear after the event.) For my part, I volunteered to build GPS files for the event. It seems that while there are some nice Google Earth route files, nobody had any GPS files on the net. So, it seemed like a good project. Look for files to be added to this website at the other link above. July 16, 2008 Post-Field Day - time to put the home station back in order. Now I have to put the station back in order. All the accessories have to be taken out of the crates and stowed, and the radio and antennas need to go back. Actually, for Field Day, I took down all my HF antennas. Well, it was only one - the B&W folded dipole I mentioned in the Apr. 8 entry. After using it, I decided that while it gave a great match across bands, it wasn't very effective at getting my signal heard. I took it down the week before field day and packed it away. This also made it easy to test antennas for FD. Now that the event is over, I decided to put my FD 80 m. dipole up permanently, along with the B&W trap dipole for 20 thru 160 that I had up before. Antennas up! It took me a full day of tweaking, but I have them both in the air now, and they're doing a pretty fair job for casual use - much better than the folded dipole! The 80 m. holds about 3:1 or better across the entire phone subband and 1:1 at midpoint. On the trap dipole, I got the lengths tuned to about the same results on 20 and 40 phone; reasonably well matched on part of the 80 phone subband and a sliver on 160. At least I can tune it in with a manual tuner. Had to run a second coax into the house for the extra antenna. Did I mention that I really hate the crawlspace under the kitchen? The rest of the house has a basement though. Now, I can actually be heard again on the lower bands! The IARU HF World Championship was my excuse .... errr... reason for the burst of activity. Turned out that I was still not quite up to the challenge of 24 hours straight, so I decided on some casual contesting instead. Spent something less that 12 hours on during the entire event, I think. While it was still fun, I only managed about 104 contacts, almost exclusively in the Western Hemisphere. I did manage to get several Hawaiian contacts as well as one Australian. Heard France, but they didn't hear me. I was surprised that I had almost no European or African contacts. Hmmm, maybe I need to investigate the arrangement of the antennas. Anyways, the shack is back in order, most of the stuff is put away from Field Day, and life returns to normal. Now, time to get back to remodeling the kitchen. Something about bare studs and no walls just doesn't look right. 73, AG4XR July 10, 2008 Field Day 2008 is in the books! Another Field Day has come and gone. This year, I took the reins as Band Captain for the RARS W4DW 80 and 15 meter phone station. Set up and tear down were a bit tedious, but what an impact we made operationally! We racked up about 440 contacts on each band! When I say 'we', I mean the four operators, including myself, that worked the station. This was beaten at our 7A operation only by the perennial stronghold of Mike Murphy, WA4BPJ on 40 meter phone. Mike and his team/family racked up about 1100 contacts. Our other stations were far behind us, in the 400 contact range or less! Hmmmm, what happened guys??????? I wanted to be cool, comfortable and bug-free this year though, and I saw the solution parked next to my house - my enclosed trailer. Add a temporary wall made from a couple scrap doors, a few 2x4's for support and throw in a window air conditioner and a folding table and you have an instant portable radio trailer! Operating comfort in the 70's while the sun beat down on a 95 degree North Carolina pasture. Not only that, but it keeps the mosquitos, the chiggers and the other thousands of other odd insects out! Oh, did I mention the apartment-sized refrigerator for the drinks? Ah, operational comfort! Besides the trailer, I brought out my Yaesu FT-1000MP, the 5500 watt generator, the usual array of accessories, meters headphones, and what-not. Antennas for this were fairly simple to field-day complicated. For 80 meters, we used a plain wire dipole strung between two trees at about 70 feet. The 15 meter solution was a little more creative. We borrowed a 3 element 15 meter monoband beam from Chuck, K4HF (he had 20 CW this year). To put it up, we bolted a short mast pipe to a 32 ft. extension ladder and stood it on end, guyed with 8 ropes. One nice touch, we added a rotor so that we didn't have to use the armstrong method and we didn't have to leave the trailer to turn the yagi. It worked really well. Anyways, Field Day was a riot! So-so operations on 15 m. on Saturday afternoon, but 80 m. was really strong from sundown till about midnight. After that, I think the country decided that they wanted to go to sleep. We forged on through the night though. I turned the mic over to Gary, KN4AQ and one of his proteges for the wee hours of the morning - I was just too tired to stay awake - probably from the heat and effort and especially the dehydration of setup in the afternoon sun two days running! After a couple hours shut-eye, I rejoined Gary and we pushed 80 for all we could until sunrise - the contacts were getting fewer and further between. Finally, a break for the team breakfast - we figured 80 was dead and 15 wasn't awake yet. Boy were we wrong! After breakfast, we decided to see if 15 had any life. It took us about 15 minutes to rack up a boatload of hunt and pounce contacts. "I think we should pick a frequency and start running." That was Gary's suggestion. Sounded good to me. It wasn't long before we hit a run rate of around 240 contacts per hour! That run rate fluctuated between 150 and 240 for around 3 hours before fading away a bit. Finally, it was 2pm and time to call an all-too-early end to Field Day. For more than the last decade, W4DW has scored high in class - generally 7A - frequently taking first place in class. We have been in the top 10 at least once, as well as the top 20 during that period. My prediction for this year? Definitely high in class. If everyone was finding the CW scores down from last year as we did, we may have scored very high overall. We'll know when the results are posted. ;-) April 8, 2008 Antennas, trimmer capacitors, hamfests, remodels and software. Oh My! Remodeling, Anyone that knows me is aware that I'm remodeling the house with plans to reolcate sometime soon. The work is taking forever though, and the budget is usually half of what actually gets spent. What does it have to do with ham radio? Well, I've saved the family room/kitchen for last. That also happens to be the ham shack. Like so many other shacks in the world, I've had to relocate the shack to the basement. I'm also about to have to move the entry point for my coax so that I can get the deck replaced. Oh joy! On the other hand, it's forcing me to sell off or trash all of the "treasures" that I don't really need at the QTH. At the same time, I'm finding things that I've been searching for months to find! That's a good indicator of "TOO MUCH STUFF!" Antennas, On the antenna front, I've been futzing with various wire antennas. I had a B&W trap dipole for 160 through 20 at about 75 feet for a while. My totally subjective opinion was that it was good on 20 and 40, but marginal on 80. The bandwidth was really narrow, around 100 kHz?, probably a lot less. And it could have been my installation, so take this with a grain of salt. Anyways, I was tired of having to manually retune every time I traversed the band. On a lark, I decided I needed a seperate antenna for 80 phone. Quick and dirty, I dug around a bit and came up with the parts - a couple dog bone insulators, one of those green dipole centers with the molded in SO239, a spool of 5000 feet of copper wire (big *(#^ eatin' grin ) that I acquired just for making antennas, and one of the handiest tools I have for the job - a Hykon wire measure and spooler. (Every wire dealer you ever see at a hamfest has one. They're perfect for spooling off wire for long wire antennas!) A soldering gun and an hour later, I had a dipole cut for 80 phone. (okay, 75 phone - nyah!) Antenna in hand, the next question was where to put it? Having over an acre on a ridge line and in 90 ft. oak trees all around makes this an easy decision - sort of. Quick and dirty strikes again! I lowered the B&W down - it's center supported on a pulley as an inverted vee , with the ends still 20 ft or more above ground -- and attached the new antenna to the same support rope about two feet higher. Basically, the 80 meter dipole (no traps) installed as another inverted vee was directly above the B&W. I didn't think they'd interact very much, but boy, was I surprised! The 80 dipole was 3:1 or better across almost the entire band! Bandwidth on the B&W improved slightly, but not much. Now, to be honest, I don't know if the monoband dipole would have been this broad banded if installed alone or not, but I wasn't in the mood to mess with it. Signal reports were good to excellent, compared to previous incarnations of antennas, so it seemed like a winner. Nothing lasts forever. In this case, it didn't last long at all. Seemed like I was getting some signals from on high. First, the center support rope broke. Then a windstorm brought the antennas down again. Finally, a B&W 90 ft. folded dipole became available at a local radio club auction. This is the one that is supposed to have a 3:1 or better SWR from 1.6 to 30 MHz and above. Sounds like just what I wanted. I needed something better on 160 and I wanted something that the radio could tune internally. It came home with me ;-) and went up a few days later. It's now at about 75 ft., but I'm not convinced it has the performance I want. It seems like a compromise on performance, although it does provide a beautiful match on every band! (But then, so does a dummy load. Hmmmmm....) Oh well, I still have an antenna in the air and a radio that works. When the mood strikes again, I'll try something else. Trimmer Capacitors, (or does your Icom 970H have a display with just dashes where the frequency should be displayed?) New project - my Icom 970H all mode developed a little problem! The 440 side wouldn't display the frequency. Oh, it would while I was turning the big round knob, but once I stopped, after a few seconds, the display just switched over to dashes. After an internet search and a session with the service manual and a volt meter, I found the problem. In the PLL circuit, there's a low locking voltage that needs to maintain at about 1 volt at the test frequency. It dropped to about 0.5. Simple adjust, turn C23 till it gets to 1 volt. Easy fix, sort of. The cap was really, really sensitive! the slightest touch would move the voltage +/- 50%! Tapping the cabinet would even alter the tuning! Bad cap? Probably, but I tuned it as much as I could and buttoned it up and it worked like a charm..... ..... for three days! More digging. Internet search.... one or two articles 'translated' from foreign languages, with missing information.... a couple calls to Icom tech support and a little luck catching the right techs, and I think I have a solution. The wisdom is that there are two trimmer caps that need to be replaced, C23 and C121. The interesting thing is that Icom has changed the part number for C121. Aparrently, they figured out that the original needed an update? Just a guess. The new part is a 12pF CERAMIC trimmer. I think C23 is a ceramic too, but not sure. Anyways, Icom service suggested that both of these caps need to be replaced. In fact, they suggested doing it for both the PLL-A (2 meter) and PLL-B (70 cm) units. Take note: THIS IS NOT IN THE ICOM KNOWLEDGE BASE! There are only a couple (perhaps only one) reference to this problem on the internet. (I found a few references, but they all seem to be copies of the same one.) Although I have the PLL-B problem temporarily fixed again, I ordered the parts so that I could make the fix permanent. I'll let you know how it works. To be honest, this was a team effort with another ham, but I didn't want to publish his call without letting him know first. ;-) Here are the part numbers to order - two each for the radio. C23 4610000110 C121 4610001990 NOTE: THIS IS A NEW PART NUMBER and replaces the original. Software I really need to find some blogging software if I'm going to do this much more! Next, I need to either find or write a logging program. I've been looking but haven't really found something that makes me happy. Since I'm also a database consultant, it should be something I can do! One more project to add to the list! And Hamfests! Can't wait for RARSFest! This Saturday! I've been doing the hamfest thing for a few years now! They're fun, but they're starting to feel more like a job than a fun, leisure activity! Can't wait till I can go to these things to find stuff instead of selling! Oh My! See you at RARSFest! ;-) 73, AG4XR |