Category: Contests - M0BPQ Amateur radio

More WY209 issues

10/16/2012

The guys from Wimo have been really quick on email and kindly sent out a new boom to fix my incorrectly packed antenna. This arrived at the Scout site on Saturday. The problem is that the box had a neat cut round the centre and the new boom is bent like a banana in two axes.

I hope the Wimo guys can claim for this from their courier as I need another one!

I took a closer look at the remaining parts to build the last yagi and found two potential problems. One is easy to solve – an element without a hole through it which I re-drilled in a flash. The second problem is not so good. The Driven Element has a tag on one side which I assume is used to align the elements and ensure they are all driven in phase. The problem I have is that I can’t align this DE with the other three in the stack without turning it round backwards! Three of the antennas have the DE tag on the left when the connector is facing forwards, whilst the final one has it on the right. Do Wimo produce the DEs in different orientations? Or has the tag been placed on the wrong side? How do I find out? I can’t use an ohm meter on a folded dipole…. Answers on an email postcard, please

Gilwell Park station layout

8/27/2010

I had an interesting discussion with Frank, M0AEU about the Gilwell Park radio station this week and have been playing around trying to design a station that will be useful for the Scouts and possibly double up as a contest site in the Scout close season. The rules for the station are simple – no wires in places where the scouts can get at them!

That doesn’t preclude temporary antennas for contests. I have done a screen grab of the site from Google earth and marked up some preliminary ideas.

The site has changed a bit from when this image was taken and the building outlined in blue has been removed and replaced with another one that is a different shape. The radio shack will be in the new building at the spot marked with the arrow. My initial thoughts are to have the following permanent antennas:

There is a commercial tower on site, about 90ft tall marked T1. My current plan is to have an HF triband yagi, plus 6m yagi on this tower. This tower would also have a side arm with halyard supporting inverted V dipoles (160, 80 and 40m, marked in purple ends >20ft above the ground). These are oriented east-west at the moment, but I am unsure of the effect of the metal roof blow them. The side arm could also hold a V/UHF vertical.

The second tower, T2, is a 40ft crank up mast with a decent sized stub mast on top. This will be the VHF mast supporting yagis for 2m and 70cm. I also have a butternut HF2V vertical antenna for 160/80/40 that could be hidden in the trees at “Bnut” to provide some low angle radiation on those bands.

This should be a fairly straightforward install as I have most of the kit to do this already.

The remaining markings are for temporary antennas that would be set up for contest use. The two green circles (rough scale to include radials) could be full size verticals for 40 and 80m. The yellow dashed lines are along thick hedgerows and could be used for reversible beverage antennas. The 800ft length would be to central America/Japan which makes sense, but I am not sure whether it is worth the effort to install a 400ft one running N/S. Is it worth having an Africa beverage? As you can see form the picture there doesn’t seem to be an easy option to install a North America beverage unless it runs across open land.

So, play fantasy radio station with me. What would you do on this site and why?

Pics from VHF NFD at G3GHN

7/7/2010

Here's a shot of all the Clifton ARS antennas at dusk, showing the 9 element interlaced 50 and 70MHz yagi in the foreground, 144MHz 9element in the middle and 15 element for 432MHz on the cherry picker at the back.

The 144MHz operating tent and 9 element DK7ZB yagi at 10m AGL.

G3JKY and G4TJE in action on 50MHZ

432MHZ yagi on a cherry picker. That makes life a lot easier. Must get another one for future contests!

VHF NFD 2010

7/5/2010

Last weekend was VHF Field day (FD) throughout most of Europe. As usual I was out with the Clifton ARS near Detling in Kent (JO01HH). I provided two stations for the contest. The 50 and 70MHz station (restricted section) was based on my heavily modified FT-847 running 100W on 6m and about 70W on 4m to a dual band yagi at 10m AGL – this station was on the air as G3JKY/p. I also provided a TS-2000, solid state amplifier and 9 element DK7ZB yagi for the 144MHz station which operated under the club call of G3GHN/p. The only technical disappointment was that the2m PA would only produce about 220W in the field where it does 325W at home – I put that down to long leads from the generator introducing voltage sag. Otherwise everything was assembled in about three hours and we were on the air no problem, which makes a change!

G0GTO and G3BSN provided a very smart cherry picker and a full station for 432MHz, that they ran as G4FAA/p.

I spent some time on 6 and 4m, and the conditions were fairly spotty with minor SpE openings on both days. We did better on 4m than in previous years, which means that 56 Qs was a reasonable return, but well down on the leaders who seemed to get much better Es than we did in the south east.

The 6m score was down on last year as there was less DX. We weren’t that far off the leaders on that band in Q total, so our position will depend on how well we did on Es compared to our rivals.

2m was a major disappointment. With only 130 QSOs this was a terrible return. Apart from being a little under powered for the open section the gear was fine and on my visits to the station I worked OZ and EA telling me that we didn’t have any electrical faults. I think the problem is rather that the operators on 2m are more DXers than contesters so they spent a lot of time tuning the band looking for people to work rather than calling CQ. I need to work on the 2m station for next year.

In contrast, Terry and Phil did a great job on 70cm working the more stations on that band than the club has for several years. Having the full legal power helps, but calling CQ for long periods of time really helped boost the score, even though the band was flat. They only ran a short yagi, so with a better antenna they could have made many more mid range contacts.

No doubt I will be reflecting on this performance over the coming months and trying to come up with a solution for the next contest!

CQ WPX

6/9/2010

          CQWPXCW Score Summary Sheet
Start Date : 2010-05-29
CallSign Used : M0BPQ
Operator(s) : M0BPQ
Operator Category : SINGLE-OP
Band : 10M
Power : QRP
Mode : CW
Gridsquare : IO91WP
Club/Team : hadley wood contest group
Software : N1MM Logger V10.2.6

        Band    QSOs    Pts WPX
         3.5       5      9    5
           7       7      18    5
          14      43      53   36
          21      23      29   18
          28      79      99   61

       Total     157     208 125
            Score : 26,000
            Rig : TS480SAT
         Antennas : Inverted L
Soapbox : That was rather fun. Lots of SpE on 10m +15m that made things interesting, but 20m was killed by the AU on Saturday evening. No DX worked (unless you count CE/PY/LU on 10m) but a really interesting trial for my new set up. That CW filter is one of my best buys for a long time!

IARU region 1 contest

5/10/2010

Last weekend I finally got to spend a little time on the air during the IARU Region 1 432 and up contest. It would be fair to say that conditions were terrible, and I only managed to work 21 stations over about 3 hours on 70cm - pretty poor indeed. That said, there was some (KST assisted) DX in there but the path was supported by the DX end who were running big stacks of yagis, like DR9A at 689Km and DJ6BS at 632Km.

It doesn’t look like there is any chance of winning anything, but here are the squares worked for the record.

IARU Region 1 VHF/UHF contest

3/9/2010

After returning from M3SXA’s place I fired up the remote rig set up to see if I could find some folks to work in the IARU 144/432 contest. Unfortunately I received several reports of bad audio and it looks like RF was getting into the Ethernet cables or RRC system at the radio end. This shows one major problem with the RRC/FT-847 combo – most of the radio functions are not available via the CAT system so it was impossible to tweak the mic gain or RF power settings to see if I could make things work at a distance. As my 8 month old son was sick in bed with a cold I couldn’t get direct access to the radio so had to give up. I did get access to the radio on Sunday and threw a handful of snap on ferrites at all the cables in the Ethernet network and audio chain. I also put my Ethernet network switch inside a metal box in case that was susceptible to RF. After taking the control half of the station to the remote end I readjusted all the levels including the DVK whilst listening on another RX. I sounded OK to me, but by that time the contest was over. I will have to get on for the 432 UKAC this week to try it out.

IARU 50MHz contest

6/21/2009

Contest Report from M0BPQ in IO91WP at 50 MHz
=============================================

Contest : IARU 50MHz
Date : 2009 Jun 20 to 2009 Jun 21
Section : Single Fixed, Low

TX : Elecraft K2 + XV50, 25 W
RX : Elecraft K2 + XV50
Antenna : 3 el, 4 mAGL, 50 mASL
Log : N1MM - post processing in TACLOG

QSOs : 87
-invalid: 1
-valid : 86
QSO-points (*1) : 126312
WWLs : 61 WWL
DXCCs : 22 DXCC
------------------------------ ------
Total score : 7705032

ODX : NP3CW in FK68WL at 6761 km

Worked World Wide Locators:
FK68: 1 JN62: 2 JN89: 2 JO61: 1 KN04: 1 KN45: 1
IN52: 2 JN65: 2 JN93: 1 JO70: 3 KN05: 1 KN48: 1
JM19: 1 JN66: 1 JN97: 1 JO81: 1 KN06: 2 KN87: 1
JM78: 1 JN72: 1 JN98: 3 JO82: 1 KN07: 1 KO00: 1
JM87: 1 JN74: 1 JN99: 3 JO90: 1 KN12: 1 KO14: 1
JN04: 1 JN75: 1 JO01: 2 JO91: 2 KN15: 2 KO15: 2
JN35: 1 JN76: 2 JO02: 1 JO92: 1 KN18: 2 KO16: 1
JN44: 2 JN83: 2 JO21: 1 JO93: 2 KN27: 1 KO20: 1
JN45: 2 JN84: 1 JO51: 1 KM64: 1 KN28: 2 KO27: 1
JN52: 1 JN85: 3 JO60: 1 KN03: 1 KN34: 1 KO40: 1
JN55: 2

Worked DXCCs:
5B : 1 EA6 : 1 HA : 3 LZ : 1 S5 : 3 YL : 2
9A : 8 F : 1 I : 13 OK : 8 SP : 11 YO : 6
DL : 3 FRj : 1 KP4 : 1 OM : 3 UR : 8 YU : 3
EA : 2 G : 3 LY : 3 ON : 1

Top 10 QSO-points:
20090620 2140 NP3CW 599 032 599 FK68WL 6761
20090621 0817 5B4AIF 59 057 59 068 KM64HV 3198
20090621 0733 EN500I 59 039 59 015 KN87XX 2732
20090620 2131 UX0FF 599 031 599 075 KN45KJ 2229
20090620 1951 YO3BL 59 003 59 062 KN34BK 2096
20090621 0743 UR4U 59 046 59 081 KO40VK 2082
20090620 1955 LZ2HM 59 006 59 042 KN12QP 2027
20090620 2037 UW5Y 59 021 59 128 KN48AN 2025
20090620 2019 IZ8DWF 59 016 59 109 JM87AW 1979
20090620 2031 I8YZO 59 019 59 322 JM78WO 1910

Remarkable Sporaid E, with very strong siganls for much of the
contest, but some very poor signals as well. Lots of fun with a
few new squares worked in Ukraine, and one carib contact for ODX.
New baby due on Monday after the contest so aws busy with jobs
getting ready for that - including sleep when the band was still
open at 2300BST on Saturday

SDR-IQ

4/6/2009

Lots of work to do, which is limiting my radio fun, but got time to try out my new SDR-IQ in the RSGB CC CW contest tonight. All I can say is WOW! Good selectivity and the waterfall is fantastic. I have almost an hour of the contest recorded (available on request) so I look forwards to playing with that in the future to see which settings are best!

Gilwell shut down and VHF FD prep

7/2/2008

Again a big gap between posts.

The radio scouting team dismantled the GB2GP shack last weekend and I have ended up with yet more kit to hide in the loft. Everything went smoothly, but there will be no radio activity from Gilwell until the LID is back running in March 2009.

The group has been offered a time step wx sat receiver and antenna though and we are investigating ways to put this up as a permanent demonstration station, perhaps coupled with a weather station. There are obvious possibilities for publishing data on the web or tying it in with a formal APRS Igate. I find the RSGB packet radio licensing forms baffling, so I may look for some help on how to move that forwards.

It is region1 VHF FD this weekend and the weather forecast is terrible! I am providing the computer network running n1MM and 3G cluster along with the 6/4m and 2m station for the Clifton ARS.

The 6/4m station will be my FT-847 running 100W on 6m and 25W on 4m to a dual band yagi at 10m agl (4 el on 6m – restricted section, 5 el on 4m low power section).

The 2m station will be my IC-756Pro, DEM transverter, linear amp, sequencer, preamp and 9 el DK7ZB at 10m AGL for the restricted section.

I might chuck in the Gilwell TS-200 to run on 70cm if we have enough operators!

That doesn’t look like much gear, but add in tents, poles, ropes, ac distribution, computers, networking, heliax, rotators and all the interconnecting cables it will fill the hire van. Never mind all the effort that goes into making it all fit together in the first place. This will probably be the last time I get so involved as it is becoming expensive and an awful lot of work! Anyone need a seasoned operator for VHF FD next year?