The Clifton ARS met up to do NFD from Detling in Kent over the first weekend in June. As usual, things were rather chaotic. Only G3JKY and I are capable contest of contest CW, and JKY doesn’t do computers which means there is much hassle around logging.

That said, the club decided to enter the open section this year. Not because we could make the 1500 Qs needed to win, but because over the years the club has won every single band in the contest except 10m and 160m so we decided to try and win one of those bands to add to the record. To do this, JKY provided a dipole for 10m, along with a vertical whilst G4RFC produced a dipole for top band. The vertical also ran on 15 and 20m, whilst the top band dipole would run on 40 and 80 if the other bands were dead. The photo shows Jakey in action with his Ten Tec radio

  As it turns out we didn’t need to worry too much as 10m was open for most of the weekend daylight hours. We made quite a few Qs, but I suspect that this will not be enough to slay the ghost as other open section entrants will have been using beams on 10m. Top band was plagued by high static – a huge thunderstorm passed within 25 miles, giving a great light show over the Thames, but JKY didn’t have to slow the rate down at all and we made 130 Qs. This is 40 less than last year, but I suspect that the wx meant that others were spending less time on the band.

The raw scores are:
      Band    QSOs    Pts
         1.8     135     950
           7       8      32
          14     101     317
          21      23      65
          28     127     722
       Total     394    2086

So let's see how we do. Hopefully it won't be rock bottom of the heap!

I have blogged several times about my involvment with the Scout radio station at Gilwell Park, GB2GP. The shack was lost 2 years ago and the HF yagi took a beating over the winter

I happened to go over there this wekeend as a group of radio scouts were using GB2GP from a tent with a dipole in the trees. I had a long discussion with a couple of the leading lights at Gilwell and it looks like a rebuild of the radio station is on the cards. I have offered my services and look forwards to getting stuck in and producing a decent station for all of the Scouts that visit the site.

I have been given a Kathrein amplifier that has just come out of commercial service on 71MHz. It is in a 19 inch rack mount panel, runs on 28V, contains a pair of isolators (with DLs) and is rated at 100W according to the panels. I haven't started to take it apart yet, but wonder if anyone has any info that can help me get started.

I have posted a few pics below if that helps....

          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!

The RSGB runs a series of short weekday evening contests. The VHF+ ones are on Tuesdays, multi mode, but the bands change, whilst the HF ones flip day and contest mode, but are always on 80m. Last week’s HF contest was 80m cw, and presented a good opportunity to test the ts-480 in remote mode, As usual, I didn't have much time to play and was only available for the last 10 minutes of the contest making about 15 QSOs. Nonetheless I learnt a few valuable lessons.

As suspected, a real front panel makes all the difference to S&P operation so the move to the ts-480 was the right one. I  used the naked bare bones 480 in contest conditions with the inbuilt dsp. Whilst the AF dsp works just fine, much better than my FT-847’s , there is clearly no substitute for real IF filtering so I have just ordered a 500Hz filter ready for the WPX contest this weekend.  

We are entering the main sporadic E season and until yesterday I was not able to get on one of my favourite bands, 50MHz, as I didn’t have an antenna in the air. The dual band 6/4m yagi plans are still ongoing so I decided that a dipole stapled to the inside of the loft rafters as an inverted V would at least give me some presence on the band. 10 minutes with the soldering iron and I had a dipole ready to go, a further 5 minutes after that it was up and ready for tuning.

I was really surprised at the effect the rafters had on the dipole. My miniVNA made light work of tuning, which was a good job as my original dipole (standard length plus 6 inches to be safe) was resonant on 38MHz! A few snips and careful rearrangement of the legs next to the roof gives an SWR of 1.3:1 on 50.150MHz, so that will do me nicely. Tuning around the band last night gave me QSOs on cw with S53A and T77C. I also heard a few Italians on SSB, but have audio problems which stops me from transmitting at the moment.

No posts for a while, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been getting on with things.

First job has to be to build remote rig RRC cables for my ts-480. As usual things didn’t go smoothly. First of all, I couldn’t get the PC to radio link to work, but some posts to the RRC forum and private email correspondence with SM2O suggested that it was best to use RRC Com port 2 for this as port one (which I was using) doesn’t work so well. I can’t explain why, but a switch to Com 2 sorted that problem out – thanks for your help Mike! The next issue was simple user error – no audio being passed from the microham DVK to the radio. I moved one connection along a pin on the microham DB37 and all was well with that.

The final problem is more serious and remains unsolved  - terrible SSB audio when running more than about 10W between top band an 20m. This is clearly an RRC related problem as removing the boxes from the circuit made the radio work just fine. Looking on the RRC forum shows that others have been having similar problems and one correspondent posted a settings fix last night which I have yet to try.

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.

I have needed to get back on the HF bands for some time, but from my suburban location getting an effective antenna was always going to be a problem. This picture shows a sat view of the house with distances marked up.

There are several questions to answer – what is an effective antenna? Which bands? DX vs EU vs intra-G? The problem is that I want it all, who doesn’t, but can only really manage a single low profile (i.e. wire) solution.

I have a pole at the bottom of the garden that is about 7m tall and it seems that I have two general options. 1) is a monopole of sorts 2) is a doublet or multiband dipole. The monopole is an OK option as I have enough room to get in an inverted L that will be effective on 80m, but the downside is that I can only have radials in my own garden and not 360 degrees around the antenna base. The doublet dipole solution is also OK, but it will be quite low to the ground and I have the additional problem of routing potentially unsightly feeder to the radio position.

Whilst a 30m (100ft) span doublet fed with open wire really appeals, I have decided to try the inverted L with auto ATU approach as I have an extensive network of radials buried in the garden already. Based on work by the late W4RNL I chose a 95 foot version (although I do not have the same vertical component as LB’s model)   It only took me a few hours over the weekend to install and I am finally back on the HF bands. First QSO was YI9PSE in Iraq on 20m, so it does seem to work, even though I doubt it will ever be a killer antenna. It’s nice to be back.

The RRC system has made radio available to me again and I am pretty happy with the performance. One problem remains – tuning is tough without a real tuning knob. I tried a griffin power mate, but to be honest it doesn’t feel the same. I am blessed with owning three fine radios - the FT-847 has proven to be a sterling performer over the 10 years that I have owned it and several sets of modifications have kept it up there as a decent shack in a box. The Ic-756Pro  shows the 847 up on HF and 6m and rocks in HF contests which the K2 combo is simply the best CW radio I have ever used. The tuning problem remains with all of these when using the RRC system. The RRC system supports remote heads for some radios, so perhaps I should be looking at those instead? The obvious option is an IC-706G2 which would provide all the bands, but it would do them all equally badly as it isn’t a great performer. The TS-2000 remote head is also possibility, by M0MCX says that it’s tuning interface is cumbersome and I can see why. That leaves the TS-480, the HF/6 performance is good but no VHF bands.  Perhaps I need to look at automating one with some of my existing tranverters?