I was operating portable on 12m (21MHz) today. It’s a band which I have hardly ever used, so I cut a half wave length of wire and used my End Fed Half Wave Coupler to match it at the base of the fibreglass pole. Conditions seemed good and I was able to work Chicago, Massachusetts, California, New York and Texas in a short time. Below is a short video and photo of the setup.
Operating on 12m beside the river Thames.
Our club operated in the CQ World Wide contest this year. We had 2 main stations running, one on 20m and the other on 15m. Some QSO’s were had on other bands too. Together, we totalled 1743 contacts. I also worked 50 from home in about an hour on 15m. More info and photos from our clubs activity can be seen here. Below is a pic of me operating the 15m station. Oh, and I shaved the beard off 🙂
M0UKD operating on 15m in the 2014 CQWW contest
The FT-897D is a very efficient transceiver for portable use, perhaps because it is designed for use with battery power in mind. As I recently purchased an Icom IC-7200 to replace it for HF use whilst portable, I thought I would do some tests on the efficiency of them both, and also my FTDX1200 for comparison. The IC-7200 is comparable to most other HF desktop transceivers, using up to 20A with a 100W carrier. (more…)
It was a clear evening last night, and the international space station was due to pass almost directly overhead (86º peak). Below is an image of the pass. My antennas are visible (Doublet, 70MHz dipole and X-50).
I’m still yet to receive any signals from all those other solar systems!
I went out for a little bit of /P operating this afternoon for just over an hour as the weather was OK. Had a nice chat on 40m with some UK stations using the end fed half wave set up as a kind of sloper. The end was up 8m on a fibreglass pole just resting against a tree, and the feed end came down to a low tree branch and then into the coupler. It seemed to perform really well on TX and RX. Below is a little clip recorded by Dave M0TAZ. Running 100w from the Icom IC-7200.
I went down to the river Thames a couple of mile from home today for some portable operation and some experimenting with an end fed half wave antenna. I recently built a Parallel tuned coupler for feeding end fed half waves from 7-30MHz and this was tested on a few bands. I wanted to try 15m, but the band was full of contest stations due to the Scandinavian contest, so I cut a piece of wire for a 17m vertical. Below is some video took by Dave M0TAZ of me working Chris SM0OWX on 18MHz.
I have used the coupler on a few different bands now in various configurations with good results. I shall add a post with more results after some more tests and fine tuning soon. Here is a photo of the inside of the unit. 73 John.
