K9OZ ham radio blog

Test from phone. Getting ready for w9dxcc

I finished my road trip today, and worked more DX. I was working an East Coast station on 20 CW while driving through Des Moines, and SP5SA (Poland) broke in to see if he could get that county. I gave him that county, and we kept talking until I reached the next county line and he got Jasper County as well. He thanked me profusely. All this while I was driving 80 mph on I-8o. Later I heard LZ50KA (Bulgaria) calling CQ and answered him. He came right back, and that was another good contact. Not bad for using an ATAS 120 antenna on the back of the Mini Cooper.

This week I took a 900 mile drive to visit a friend in West Nebraska. That gave me a lot of mobile time. Here are some highlights. Early on the trip Monday I had a long contact with someone (his call escapes me) who I've talked to a few times from Pennsylvania. While we were talking he viewed this blog, and commented on the photos of the mobile setup. That's how it's supposed to work. Shortly after that I was calling CQ on 40 meters and W7AAZ/m came back to me. It turned out he was about 400 miles ahead of me on I-80, also heading west. We talked for about an hour, largely about mobile setups -- his was in a Corvette -- then both stopped for lunch at the same time. A half hour later I called him again, and we went for another half hour or so. Great mobile activity. Today I started the eastbound trip. This morning I was having no luck on 40 meters, so listened to the I-pod instead. Then this afternoon I switched to 20, and was still having minimal luck. So I settled in on a

I got the Steppir vertical back in a vertical position this weekend, and it's nice to have it back in service. It blew over during a thunderstorm this summer. I was lucky, the concrete that the support post split and the antenna tipped over without being damaged. I normally keep it guyed, but had removed the guys due to an ongoing deck construction project. Now that project is done, and the antenna back up. I'll have it guyed again by tomorrow night. I haven't been on the air much. Just some random rag chew QSO's on 40 and 30 meter cw. This morning I had a nice chat with Bill, W3BW, on 40. We've talked a few times, so carried on the conversation talking about my experience with cw mobile operation. As I get more active this fall, I promise to get more active with the blog...famous last blog words.

While summer is not the traditional best time for ham radio -- noisy bands and too much outside activity -- there are a few contests in the summer and that's been most of my activity as late. Last night I ran the North American QSO party, with a respectable 340 contacts in about six hours of operating. The bands were noisy, but workable, so I had a good time. A couple weeks ago I operate he IARU contest for a few hours working a nice range of DX, with even a few contacts on 15 meters. Maybe the bands will come back. I had a nice surprise in the mail right after that contest -- I got a certificate in the mail that I had placed first place in CW only High Power in Illinois in the 2008 contest. That is kind of a fluke, as the big guns in Illinois all entered as low power and had many more contacts than I, but I'll still take the first-place finish. It show why to send in a log, even if you think you have no chance of ever winning. That's been about the size of my activity. W

Our success was due to good antennas. Here are photos of the 20 meter loop held up by Brad's push-up pole and my phased verticals, with my aunt's windmill in the background. No, we didn't use the windmill as an antenna support, but we thought about it.

I travelled to Nebraska again this year to particpate in Field Day with my cousin Brad, KG0GY. We did our first attempt last year, had a lot of antenna problems but managed about 360 contacts. This year we were much better prepared and organized on the antenna front, and did 800 contacts as a 2B station. We ran a K2 and an Icom 756 Pro to phased verticals on 40, a loop up about 40 feet on 20, and a multi-band OCF dipole on 80, 40 and 15. The dipole wasn't high enough for us to do much on 80, but it did well on 40 and 15. We were very happy to more than double our contacts from the year before, and we're starting to wonder how to top that next year. We operated about 15 hours, slept for a few hours in beds, and had dinner with my aunt. Not a bad Field Day at all. Shown in the photo is Brad, running the K2 on 40 meters. We were inside the door of an old shed, but running on emergency power.

I was having problems with high SWR (standing wave ratio) on my ATAS 120 mobile antenna. My guess was the feedline, which was the standard tiny coax that comes with a Comet or Diamond trunk lip mount. I ordered the Coment 3D4M coax cable assemly, which has 13 feet of RG58 coax. All of a sudden my SWR on the ATAS goes down to 1:1 on 40 meters and some random RF problems are solved. Lesson -- use real coax on HF mobile, not the miniature type that's designed to go through a gap easily, but may be so-so on transmitting and sheilding RF.

I made it to the Dayton Hamvention and back last weekend. The highlight for me was the contest forum on Saturday morning. I just stumbled into it, but had a great time and learned some things. I seemed more at homewith the contesters than most of the groups I was involved with at Dayton. Most contesters are CW ops, that's part of it. My big Dayton purchase was a Stationmaster controller from Microham. It's purpose is to interface between the K3 and the PW-1 amp. I got it up and running, but it's been buggy so far, and seems to go into error mode every now and then. I'll keep messing with it, but so far I'm regretting my purchase. It added a lot of complextity to the station, just so I wouldn't have to push a button on the amp and the SteppIR vertical controller when I changed bands. I saw that at good insurance for the amp, but so far, I'm not sold. More on that later.

I'll be in Dayton one week from tonight. Any followers or tweeters going to be there. Let's do a meet-up.