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Working WFD CW today.

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  • mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoundefined

    Working WFD CW today. Didn't yesterday due to doing storm preparations. Not a serious contester here, just pulled up not1mm, and am using it to send code so that I don't slow down more serious folks with my bad keying, just using the key when I need to send something that I didn't have a macro for, or to send slowly. Just now, I was delighted that I copied a 2x3 call on first hearing at 35WPM and then was deflated to hear "TEST" afterwards. I didn't know what contests are currently active, but I'm trying to do WFD not a contest.

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  • mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoundefined mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info

    Working WFD CW today. Didn't yesterday due to doing storm preparations. Not a serious contester here, just pulled up not1mm, and am using it to send code so that I don't slow down more serious folks with my bad keying, just using the key when I need to send something that I didn't have a macro for, or to send slowly. Just now, I was delighted that I copied a 2x3 call on first hearing at 35WPM and then was deflated to hear "TEST" afterwards. I didn't know what contests are currently active, but I'm trying to do WFD not a contest.

    mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoundefined

    Yay, I worked @kb6nu

    Even though I'm doing this from home, I decided to operate QRP, so I have the rig turned down to a measly 5W. Operating QRP is an exercise in patience to get through, but I'm now to the point that most of the calls I copy get a big red DUPE in not1mm. I got two on 40m, which was two more than I was expecting. I won't have a map handy until I load from not1mm into wavelog, but so far south Florida, Connecticut, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Minnesota, Michigan, Quebec, and Ontario bound the stations I've worked so far.

    Almost everything has been on 20m but a few 40m QSOs.

    One more hour.

    kb6nu@mastodon.radioundefined mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoundefined 2 Replies
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  • mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoundefined mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info

    Yay, I worked @kb6nu

    Even though I'm doing this from home, I decided to operate QRP, so I have the rig turned down to a measly 5W. Operating QRP is an exercise in patience to get through, but I'm now to the point that most of the calls I copy get a big red DUPE in not1mm. I got two on 40m, which was two more than I was expecting. I won't have a map handy until I load from not1mm into wavelog, but so far south Florida, Connecticut, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Minnesota, Michigan, Quebec, and Ontario bound the stations I've worked so far.

    Almost everything has been on 20m but a few 40m QSOs.

    One more hour.

    kb6nu@mastodon.radioundefined

    @mcdanlj Hey! My pleasure, Michael. 😀

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  • mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoundefined mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info

    Yay, I worked @kb6nu

    Even though I'm doing this from home, I decided to operate QRP, so I have the rig turned down to a measly 5W. Operating QRP is an exercise in patience to get through, but I'm now to the point that most of the calls I copy get a big red DUPE in not1mm. I got two on 40m, which was two more than I was expecting. I won't have a map handy until I load from not1mm into wavelog, but so far south Florida, Connecticut, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Minnesota, Michigan, Quebec, and Ontario bound the stations I've worked so far.

    Almost everything has been on 20m but a few 40m QSOs.

    One more hour.

    mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoundefined

    40m came alive in the last hour, as we started to get close to evening, and as 20m was frankly played out.

    I was going to plug my rig into battery, but then saw in the rules that your computer has to be on battery power as well, and I didn't have a way to plug my shack computer into battery, so I didn't bother running the rig off battery.

    Then when I went to submit my log, I saw that actually your logging computer can be mains powered, so the rules must have been about the computer you are using for digital modes. Which I wasn't. I did all CW, no multi-mode multipliers for me!

    So I could have gotten another multiplier for my 2-point CW QSOs for my solar-charged battery, as well as the 4x QRP multiplier. I could have had 510 points instead of 408 points. Which doesn't matter at all because I'm not actually in any form of contention for anything; I worked only about five hours thanks to all the winter storm prep. And even if I'd worked the whole time I still wouldn't be competitive. I only hunted, I didn't run.

    And running only 5W, I didn't even make the antenna wire warm enough to melt the ice that was covering it.

    Maybe next year I'll run instead of hunting. But probably still QRP, and maybe actually in the field...

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    Well, that was a first.

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    amoroso@oldbytes.spaceundefined
    @bitsplusatoms What was the ship name? Princess of the Airwaves? 😀
  • mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoundefined

    @qrper mentioned in his recent video how some hams like to make antennas.

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    mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoundefined
    The prototype worked well enough that I'll proceed on to another iteration. Leaning it out with two legs held up by the radial wire worked well, and the little knobs on the top of the spool to hold the wire in place work fine. I'll made them a touch larger to be more robust, but the concept works.I want to be able to fit 12m of wire on the spool, because I want radials that work well as flat radials on 40m, which might take up to 28%λ instead of the nominal ¼λ which would be appropriate in the "discone" setup with 45° radials. However, with this wire, 8m barely fits on this spool. So I need to add a generous allowance for more wire.I need a handle for the hub at the bottom so that I can wind it up with the legs removed. It's unwieldy with two 6' long fiberglass stakes.According to DJØIP, 1 elevated, tuned radial is roughly equivalent to 8 ground radials. Two of these should give me the performance of 16 ground radials. According to his table, I can expect 3.76dB gain over my usual 4 radials on the ground, or even more if I'm using a shortened antenna.With these just leaning, if someone inadvertently walks into my bright pink wire, they'll probably just knock over the leaning posts, which is unlikely to cause a big problem. I'll probably use bullet connectors for the other end of the wire so that they can pop out and not knock the antenna over.
  • mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoundefined

    Today's #HamRadio #POTA (Parks On The Air) adventure.

    Uncategorized hamradio pota
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    mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoundefined
    Today's #HamRadio #POTA (Parks On The Air) adventure. Absolutely gorgeous, couldn't-be-better fall weather on a Saturday, so that it was a little surprising that we found parking space and that all the picnic tables were empty. Used my spiderbeam push-up mast to hold my inverted-v linked dipole up, tied the ends out to some trees, and got on the air on 20 meters, using CW (morse code) as usual. I first hunted operators in other parks and got 4 QSOs, but the pileups were deep, so I found a quiet frequency and called CQ. I didn't have to wait for responses, either! Some pileups were so deep they sounded like modem noise (showing my age here). A little intimidating for the new CW operator, but the other operators were patient with me.AZ is one of the states I haven't gotten in my hunter logs yet, so I was happy to see AZ pop up for one call sign. However, that operator reported IL, so I still don't have AZ. I'll have to keep hunting!By the end, I was getting a lot of QRM (interference from human sources). That's the curse of operating QRP (low power) — I'm sure they couldn't hear my measly 5W and weren't intentionally operating on top of me. That was OK, though; I had 31 QSOs and I was ready to QRT (quit) for the day.
  • mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoundefined

    We had a surprise opportunity to go to the beach this weekend, near Southport NC.

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    mcdanlj@social.makerforums.infoundefined
    We had a surprise opportunity to go to the beach this weekend, near Southport NC. I have the weird preference to sling my hammock under the house, between the clotheslines, instead of sleeping indoors. Half camping? I use a big rubbermaid box as my "suitcase" and put my shoes on it overnight... It was cold at night, but an underquilt and reflecting bubble insulation in the hammock, with an inflatable mattress on top of my down sleeping bag, kept me cozy.My wife and I went to Fort Fisher State Recreation Area and set up a pair of #HamRadio transceivers. Because this weekend was SSB CQ World Wide DX contest, she couldn't find an empty space to call CQ, and had trouble breaking through pileups, so after a few QSOs she decided it wasn't fun any more and read a book. It was not the CW CQ DX contest weekend, so I successfully activated US-3842 with Morse code. Then back at the beach house, I kept ducking out onto the porch to hunt #POTA operators using CW, with a 33' random wire antenna hanging from a spiderbeam pole, connected to the 9:1 port on my tiny little homebrew QRP dual-port unun. One of those QSOs was with the ham who sold me my KX3 that I used to make the contact! 🎉I gave the random wire a workout with QSOs on 40, 30, 20, 17, and 15 meters. Tried hunting with no luck on 80, 12, and 10 meters.The wind eventually broke the antenna wire off the terminal, so I'll want to fix that before going out again. But at the beach, it was easy to bodge that by stripping back a bit of insulation and screwing the bare wires in the terminal.