Just another Amateur Radio Operator
ben Over the weekend, the 2016 Oceania DX Contest was held. This was my first contest for the season, having missed this years RD Contest due to other commitments. This year was definitely hard going compared to last year, with band propagation conditions truly terrible throughout the contest and then suffering the static crashes from a … Read more
This arrived in the mail last week. I’m pretty happy about it š It now means I can provide assistance with foundation courses and exams that my local radio club holds.
I recently had the pleasure of helping my radio clubĀ host a stand as part of the Festival of Bright Ideas in Hobart, held has part of National Science Week. This has been one of the first public events that the club has been involved with for some time, and has it turned out, it was a great success!
If it’s one thing that continually amazes me is the impact Arduino & IoT are having on Amateur Radio. Things that were once complex pieces of electronics with a complex price tag are now commoditised and available for pennies. When I first started, a CAT rig control interface could cost up to $200, particularly if … Read more
I had a day trip to Launceston today to assist a new amateur radio operator get on air with his HF rig. I decided that if I has some spare time left over we could stop by the nearby Trevallyn Recreation Nature Reserve and work a few contacts from it. VKFF-1156 is again somewhere … Read more
It’s been a little while since I have posted, and its not because I haven’t been doing anything. I’ve been getting my portable station even more portable that before. Ov er the past 3 weeks where I have had a spare evening I have been putting together a new portable station that is even more lightweight than the previous setup featured in my post on Peter Murrell Reserve. Key to this has been producing a linked dipole.
Linked dipoles provide the benefit of creating a single-wire antenna that is resonant on multiple bands without a tuner by “linking” together lengths of wire with clips. While there is no limit on how many links you make, it may not be practical to make the dipole suit everything between 1.8 and 450 Mhz.
I ended up going for a 5 band antenna – 6m, 10m, 15m, 20m, 40m.
As much as I am a fan of Summits On The Air (SOTA), activating a summit requires a level of portability that I am yet to obtain as well as a level of fitness that I am yet to obtain too, which is why I got pretty excited when I discovered the World Wide Flora and Fauna (WWFF) Program.
Recently there have been a number of additions made to the Database for VK7, which originally was national parks only. The inclusion of a number of new conservation reserves meant that I was able to activate Peter Murrell Reserve which was only 30 minutes away as opposed to a significant 2 hour drive to the nearest national park. It also helped that the carpark fell just within the VKFF boundary.
Being such a glorious day weather wise I made the spur of the moment decision to activate the park.
This post will end the saga where I let the magic smoke out of a somewhat expensive commercial antenna.
Today a package arrived in the mail from china which greatly excited me. In it was 100x 10k ohm 3 Watt carbon film resistors from eBay, costing around $8 including delivery. with these, some Veroboard and a little bit of patience I was rebuilding the resistive loads in the antenna. one of the old loads is on the left and the new home brew one is on the right. The damaged resistors are marked as 10k ohm, but measuring them with a multimeter gave a reading of 1.1k ohm.
AboveĀ is a rather fine example of letting the smoke out. My last postĀ talked about replacing a dipole that had worked well for many years but suddenly not so much. With the options of breaking it all apart to check the inside pieces, or throwing out the antenna, I chose the former. What you are looking … Read more
When I made up the 4:1 balun earlier this week, I didn’t realise that I would be putting it to use by the end of the week!
Ever since I got active again, the commercial multi band dipole that I had been using for many years was no longer working optimally. When I first purchased it, it had an SWR of < 1.8:1 across most bands, but recently the SWR had had risen to around 2.5:1 across most bands. After discussing and troubleshooting the issue with the antenna manufacturer, it was decided the cost to replace faulty parts exceeded the original purchase price of the antenna.
It was time to replace the antenna.