Archive: Author: aa4ga

Well, I got none of the antenna improvements done I was hoping for, nor did I have a new radio.  The condx seemed down, and my score bore that out…as did some of the preliminary reports I’ve seen on the 3830 list.

I went to the Lawrenceville hamfest in the morning, and was later getting home than I wanted to be – I just kept on running into old friends I hadn’t seen in years, as well as visiting with new ones I’ve made since I’ve become a QRPer.  And I didn’t even get to see *all* of the stuff at the ‘fest before I decided I had to head back home to get ready for SS.  We took the scenic route to avoid UGA homecoming football traffic on the way home, so that slowed us down….etc.

After getting everything set up and ready for the contest, I found I only had about 20 minutes for the 2-hour nap I was hoping for!  Oh well.  The first hour this year was actually a little better than it was last year, and I was able to hold run frequencies a little more than last year.  But, in the end, my score was still down a bit, just over 10% actually – and that was with more multipliers than last year too as well as an additional hour in the chair!

Even with the less-than-exciting results, I was fairly happy with the FT817’s performance (hint: turning down the RF gain really helps on 80 and 40!), as well as the old reliable 80m doublet.  I also used an EFHW on 20 some, but could have gotten by without that one.

Here’s the sad tale:

Band  QSOs
————
   80:  101
   40:  161
   20:  101
   15:   66
   10:    2
————
Total:  431  Sections = 80  Total Score = 68,960


Mults missed were SB, MB, and NL.  For the second year in a row, I was able to complete WAS QRP with an 80m doublet in one weekend….it’s amazing how well QRP works sometimes!

Already looking forward to next year’s SS!

Anna (a/k/a Mrs. AA4GA) suggested that it might be nice for the two of us to take a day off work and head to the mountains to do a little leaf watching in the form of a hike and SOTA activation.  Sounded good to me, so we both arranged to be off work and headed for North Carolina.

Whiteside Mountain is about two hours north of us, but we stretched that out a bit, taking a more circuitous route on some slightly less-travelled roads.  It was a good choice, as we were able to see a bit of color on Highway 28 through South Carolina and Georgia, although the leaves were definitely past their peak – we shoulda been there last weekend!

No matter, as it was a super day for a walk in the woods.  This was our third trip up Whiteside this year, and my second SOTA attempt there.  Our first two trips were in July, and both were cut short by thunderstorms.  As we arrived today, there were some clouds, and it was obvious it had rained not long before we got there, but it looked like there was no storm threat, so we headed up the hill.

The trail at Whiteside is about 2 miles, and makes a loop, with the counterclockwise direction being shorter to the summit, but steeper.  The clockwise direction follows an old logging road, and with my knees, is the route I prefer, both ascending and descending, so that’s the route we took.  After a mile or so, we came to the first overlook – it’s quite a spectacular sight after hiking through the woods.  After that, there are several overlooks before coming to the summit, each amazingly more spectacular than the last.  The trail is in great shape, and gains about 800 feet in the mile or so to the summit.

Near the top, we found a nice spot just off the trail – it looked like a remnant of the old road used for sightseers in the early 1900s.  Nice and flat, with a little room to stretch out my 30′ of wire and a counterpoise.  Like the previous Wildcat Mountain activation though, I did have a kink or two in my antenna.  Again, it didn’t seem to matter too much, as I was able to make 19 QSOs on 20 and 40 meters, including England and the Slovak Republic, all on CW at 5 watts from the FT817ND.

The battery on the FT817 is starting to show its age – I only operated for about 40 minutes, and at the end of that time, the voltage was dropping to around 9 volts on transmit.  I had charged the battery only a couple days before the trip, so it should have been in decent shape.  I decided to leave the gel cell in the car this time, but may have to lug it around in the near future until I can get some kind of lithium pack setup for this rig.  I really need to start using the ATS3B for SOTA, but I need to work out an antenna solution that won’t present high SWR to the rig while tuning, as that rig’s final transistors are a little fragile.  I’ve got some ideas, so stay tuned here to see how that pans out.

Click for larger!

KU6J’s new RBNGate system worked FB – and a good thing, as I left my smart phone in the car at the trailhead and couldn’t have self-spotted if I needed to!  I also forgot to write down my summit designator before I left and totally spaced out on what it was when I was asked by KE5AKL, who himself was on summit W5A/PT-003 – thanks for the S2S QSO!  The hardest part of the activation was trying to keep the official mascot of aa4ga-dot-com from getting tangled up in the counterpoise!

Another good day playing radio from on top of a mountain!

Summits on the Air (a/k/a SOTA) is a program started in the UK that combines hiking and operating ham radio.  Most, but not all “activators” operate QRP, but it’s not required – it just depends on whether or not the op wants to lug around enough battery power to operate QRO!

When I started operating exclusively QRP last year, there was a lot of talk in the QRP forums about SOTA – the program has been around for 10 years, but only in the past couple years or so has it started taking off in the US.  Each area is represented by an “Association”, and until 10/1/2012, my home state of Georgia did not have a SOTA Association.  Thanks to the efforts of Christian, AK4VV, we are now officially part of SOTA and there are 136 summits that qualify under SOTA rules.  Having become a QRPer with small radios capable of efficient portable operation, I felt compelled to go mountaintopping – after all, that’s really a QRP tradition.

So, in order to celebrate the new Georgia Association (W4G), Christian obtained the special callsign W4G for use the first two weeks of the new Assocation by various groups and individuals.

My plans were to be on Black Rock Mountain (W4G/NG-027) precisely at 0000Z on 10/1, but the WX did not cooperate – which really suited me, as it would have meant a tear-down and load-out after dark.  Black Rock isn’t as remote as a lot of places (the main reason I wanted to activate it at 8pm local!), but it still wouldn’t be much fun packing up and walking back to the car in the dark.

My alternate was to activate Brasstown Bald (W4G/NG-001) the next day after work (local, but still the official first day), but again the rains came down pretty heavily and QTA’d that plan.  Since I work only an hour or so from Brasstown Bald and it has a short path to the top from the parking lot, I figured I could easily activate it after work one day if I could get away early.  Well, Friday, 10/5 I got that chance.  I posted an alert at SotaWatch to let folks know I would be active.  My estimated start time was 2100Z, and that is exactly when my first QSO was logged – can’t guess any closer than that!

Brasstown Bald is Georgia’s highest point, and is under control of the US Forest Service.  They have a parking lot about 500′ vertically below the summit, where there is ample parking, along with restroom facilities and a store.  The charge to park is $3 per person, not per car.  The FS also operates a shuttle bus that will take you to the top of Brasstown Bald for $3 per person.  Of course, generally taking the shuttle bus to the summit would be frowned upon by SOTA, but some leeway is allowed for folks with mobility issues.

I took the trail.  It has been many years since I walked the trail to the summit, and I didn’t recall that the trail was asphalt – it may not have been, but it is now!  About 4′ wide and relatively steep.  I did see at least one couple with a baby stroller…I’m glad they were pushing it up hill and not me!

Historical marker on right

I’m slow going up hills, but relatively steady, so I eventually reached the summit – the trail is 6/10 mile and gains 500′ in elevation.  When you break out of the trail to the summit, there is the observation tower just in front of you, with a Georgia historical marker on the right, along with a little open grassy area with a couple benches.  Not totally out in the open, which I figured would be a good thing due to the large amount of traffic that goes to the Brasstown Bald summit.  So, that is where I decided to operate.

I found a rock and tied it to some cord and tossed it up into a tree maybe 15 or 18 feet up.  I then measured out about 30′ or so of #26 hookup wire and pulled it up into the tree.  The resulting antenna was a low sloper.  I fed it to an Elecraft T-1 tuner and a 15′ or so counterpoise, which was placed on the ground.  Matching was no problem on 40 through 15 meters, but as low as the antenna was, I was concerned it wouldn’t work very well.  But work it did!  I ended up with 24 QSOs, mostly stateside, but a couple DX contacts as well.  Best DX by far was VK5CZ, who had to have been worked long path considering the  time of day of our QSO.  This was all using a Yaesu FT817ND at 5 watts output on CW.

View from the summit

Saturday, I planned to do two summits: Black Mountain (W4G/NG-022) and Big Cedar Mountain (W4G/NG-023), as they are accessed from the same trailhead.  Unfortunately, I got a later start than I wanted, and ended up in a small town having a fall festival and getting ready for a parade, so my progress slowed to a crawl.  Luckily, since I knew I was running late, I had revised my ETA, and hit the revised time to the minute.

First up was Black Mountain:  this peak is accessed by an old Forest Service road just north of the Woody Gap parking lot maintained for the Appalachian Trail.  Black Mountain isn’t on the AT, but is a short side trip.  The “trail” is about a mile or so, and gains 600′ of elevation.  The FS road is the trail!  It initially starts out wooded, but after a sharp left turn, as the elevation starts to rise, the road is joined by a power line, which has a large right-of-way opened up.  So most of the hike up is basically walking on an exposed gravel road – not a shaded mountain trail.  The gravel is fairly large, averaging 1 two 2 inches.  The loose gravel didn’t make the climb easy, and it made the descent a real pain because the rocks moved a lot underfoot.  But, that doesn’t matter much, as the summit itself is great!  There is a fire tower – the gate was open when I was there, but don’t count on that.  There is also a large rock formation, which made for some nice open views in several directions.  I decided to operate back from the summit at the edge of an opening so I could use the trees for an antenna support.

The 30′ wire sloper worked so well at Brasstown Bald, I put it back up on Black Mountain…with similar results:  29 QSOs including several DX stations.  The day was nearly perfect – saw no one else on the trail at all, there was a nice breeze blowing, with the leaves rustling.  Due to my late start however, I decided not to activate Big Cedar, as I didn’t want to be rushed on the summit, and I needed to get home to take care of our dog, as Mrs. AA4GA was out of town.  I figure the mountain isn’t going anywhere, I’ll get another shot at it!

The actual summit

Sunday I had decided to activate Wildcat Mountain (W4G/NG-020), and to do so using the special W4G callsign.  Wildcat is accessed off the Appalachian Trail from the Hogpen Gap parking area.  Just a couple miles up the AT, a trail splits off to the left that goes to the Whitley Gap shelter.  Total distance from the parking lot to the summit is about a mile or so, and only 300′ of elevation gain.  This was a pleasant walk, with a nice rhododendron tunnel on the Whitley Gap trail.  Just below the summit (well inside the activation zone) there are some rock formations with views, although it’s not as open as Black Mountain.  The summit itself is mostly wooded, with a slight opening, and this is where I set up my station.  I did get a little spooked, as I had to step over a couple piles of relatively fresh bear poop when I put up the antenna!

Because it was a little crowded, I didn’t have room to fully deploy the 30′ sloper, so the antenna had a couple bends in it.  No problem apparently, as I was able to make 27 QSOs, again including several DX stations.  I was planning on staying a little longer than I did, but because I was already a little on edge looking for Smoky Bear and I heard some thunder in the distance, I decided it was time to head home.

I learned a good bit this weekend, and discovered that I have a pretty good system for deploying my antennas and setup and take-down.  It only takes 10 to 15 minutes from start to CQ, which I’m happy with. Packing up is even quicker, as I don’t have to choose an antenna location!  I still haven’t figured out yet what to do on treeless summits, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something.

A fun three days and end to the first week of the Georgia Association – thanks to everyone for all the QSOs.  I probably won’t try to activate 3 or 4 summits in one weekend again, but I do hope to go out several more times during the nice fall WX!

You may have noticed that I didn’t have any of my own photos and had to reference some others I found on the www – Mrs. AA4GA had the camera with her – I don’t know why I didn’t think to use my phone!  Anyway, originals, with more info about the areas are at summitpost.org and ellijaygeorgiacabins.com.

CW Ops is an international organization designed to bring together Amateur Radio operators who enjoy using Morse code.  As of this writing, there are just over 1000 members worldwide.  CW Ops is very active in on-the-air activities, including two monthly contests.  Last year, they started the “CW Open”, a longer weekend-based contest that is similar to the monthlies, in that the contest is split into three stand-alone periods.  For the CW Open, the sessions are 4 hours each, and it’s effectively like having three separate 4-hour contests on the same day.  Each 4 hour session is separated by a 4-hour off period.  One of the neat things about the CW Open is that it also features a team competition:  teams of up to 10 operators can be formed to aggregate the operators’ scores from the three sessions.  I had the idea of forming a team of all QRP operators – not necessarily to win (that would be tough against the many QRO stations out there!), but to give QRP a little publicity …and to just have fun!  So, “Team Limbo” was formed:  how low can you go?

We missed a full team by one op, so that’s 9 QRP stations on our team.  Last year, there were only 7 QRP entries total for the contest, so that’s actually a pretty good showing!

Here are the Team Limbo ops and scores by session:

Just damn.

This one never even got off to a good start.  Last year was my first FD by myself, operating QRP in class 1B-battery.  I ended up in ninth place, which I was fairly happy with considering my apartment location and smallish 50-foot doublet.  So, this year I decided to revive my goal of making top-5 in my class, and planned on putting up a full 80m doublet at our new home out in the country, and possibly even a couple more antennas for switching directions on 20m and up and such.

Instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour on Friday and getting up Saturday morning like I’d “planned”, I stayed up late and slept in on Saturday.  Around about noon (that’s T-minus 2 hours to the start of FD here), I went out to the shop and started looking for stuff to build my antennas and get them up.  Let’s just say it wasn’t all exactly where I thought it would be!  As a result, I got a later start this year than last year – it was 37 minutes into the contest before I got on.  Dang.

The weather was miserably hot and humid, in the 90s here in Georgia…and in all that time, I only got up the one antenna:  an 80m doublet with the feedpoint up about 25 or 30 feet.  Not great, but still better than I had last year.  Unfortunately, the solar flux was in the mid 80s and the sunspot number was in the mid teens, with higher band propagation forecast as “poor” and 20 meters only “fair”.  Well, at least I won’t miss those other 20m and up antennas I wanted to put up.  And, luckily, I’ll have a workable antenna on 80m, in contrast to last year, and a better antenna on 40.

So, I’m off to the races and yes, the bands suck.  So much so that I’m easily distracted and my butt-in-chair factor suffers.  I never get any runs going and spend most of my time search and pounce.  Finally things settle down a bit, but it definitely feels slower than it did last year.  I guess I should have printed out some rate sheets to compare…maybe I’ll do that later…

I take a little nap or two, get something to eat, look at the Dish Network receiver when Mrs. AA4GA tells me it died, etc.  I’m sitting back at the rig around 9pm when a storm comes through – a good bit of rain, and a lot of wind – probably gusting over 40 knots…the wind kept up for a half hour and the rain about an hour or hour and a half.  It was so bad at one point, I thought about tearing the computer and rig down and hauling them back inside the house, but since there was no apparent lightning, I kept at it.

I decided this year to actually try some SSB contacts for two reasons:  one was to fill in some of the slower times when the CW band seemed worked out, and the other was to work my local club – I figured since I was not joining them for FD, I should probably make an effort to work them – they were at W4G, a multi-club effort, and only about 5 miles from here, but I never heard them.  So I made a few SSB contacts, but when I moved to 75m late in the evening, lots of loud stations were CQing in my face.  Oh, and the little SSB operating I did mostly served to remind me why I’m almost exclusively a CW operator…I know it’s got a lot to do with it being Field Day, but most of the operating procedure I heard made my skin crawl like fingernails on a chalkboard.  I doubt I’ll take a mic to FD next year…

Around midnight, I needed a nap, even though I knew it was probably prime time on 80 and 40…so I set a clock for an hour and a half.  I finally got up about 3:15 am.  Par for the course.  I operated for about three hours, knowing my wife would be up at 7 and that would get me back at the rig again…which it did…around 8 or 8:30 when Anna left the house.  She stuck her head back in the door as she was leaving:  “hey, you sure do have a lot of wires out here”.  “Yes, I do…they’re just temporary!”  I figured she was talking about the 2nd and 3rd antennas I’d just left in the yard and not put up at the beginning of FD.

So I slogged through the rest of the contest, but it was really slower than I’d figured it would be based on yesterday’s condx.  Oh well, the propagation’s got to be bad for everyone.  With my distraction and bad condx, my score was over 25% off last year’s, and I was looking to improve…ugh.  As it ended up, I had 329 QSOs this year compared to 449 last year…and I was hoping for 500 plus.  I got the same 250 bonus points as last year, and this year’s score would have placed 14th last year, so with worse condx, maybe still in the top 10…total points this year:  3,500.

So I come in the house to chillax after the contest and look out the front door and see my antenna…which I should not be able to see!  The feed point is at the grand height of three feet!  No wonder no one was answering me on 75m last night!  No wonder so many of my QSOs were like pulling teeth!  I figure the antenna had loosened up in the storm last night, so I operated 75% of the contest with the antenna almost on the ground!  So, chalk this one up to lesson learned…I hope!

Next year…don’t stay up late on Friday.  Get up early on Saturday to put up the antennas – and have the antennas built ahead of time!!  Get done hanging the antennas before the WX gets unbearably hot.  Go inside into the air conditioning and nap after getting everything set up.  Start on time – when 2pm Sunday arrives, even though some folks can continue operating, the bands really empty out and that’s wasted time.  Oh, check every once in a while to make sure the antenna’s still up!  As long as I’ve been doing this, you’d think most of this would be second nature, eh?

What I did do new this year that I like was set up on a north-facing porch on the side of the house – it’s covered and never gets hit with direct sunlight, so it’s relatively cool.  I’m likely to operate there again next time.

Last year I did a basic analysis of battery used and used a total of 8.6 amp-hours.  This year, I used the same equipment exactly (FT817ND at 5 watts), and total battery consumption was just under 8 amp-hours, so I’m sure I operated less this year…without analyzing the logs, I’d guess 16 hours total.

Here are the band totals:


  Band CW Qs  Ph Qs 
——————-
   80:   42     2
   40:  153     4
   20:   67     0
   15:   59     2
——————-
Total:  321     8  


With bonus points and power multiplier, Total Score = 3,500.


See you in FD 2013!

From Universal Radio

I got a TS-440 way back in the 1980s – it was my first solid-state, no-tune-final rig.  It had an automatic antenna tuner.  It was amazing.  Later on, I upgraded it so it would talk to my computer.  I did other mods too:  I added the ability to use a separate RX antenna, installed International 2.1 kHz and 400 Hz filters, and added a board that let me monitor my SSB transmissions (that was back when I operated a lot of phone contests).  For a TS-440, it was pretty tricked out.  I worked a lot of contests and DX with that radio.

Then, in the 90s, I got a pair of FT-990s and the ‘440 went on the shelf.  It stayed there for a few years until one day I decided to hook it up and blow out the cobwebs…but the old faithful ‘440 just showed dots on the display.  Dang.  So, I put it back on  the shelf, where it stayed a few more years.  I probably would have sold it, except I knew no one would give me what the upgrades were worth…and it was a radio I had a history with and didn’t really want to sell.

I eventually surfed up info on the “dots” problem and decided I’d try to get the rig going again…a couple years later (last week!) I finally got around to checking it out.  I hooked the ‘440 to a 12 volt supply and hit the power switch – I was amazed when the rig powered up on a frequency and not with dots displayed.  But every few seconds, the display would flicker to dots, but would come back on frequency – not as bad as I’d remembered, but still not usable.  I had discovered over the years that the dot display was an indication that one of the PLLs in the rig had lost its lock. The primary culprit was some rubber potting compound that Kenwood used that goes bad over the years and becomes conductive.  There are several other potential causes, but a cleanup of VCO-5 is the best place to start.

The other tell-tale sign of a problem with VCO-5 is rough audio – which I discovered I had.  The QRG was a bit jumpy as well.  So, I dug into the rig and popped the top off the VCO-5 shield.  Sure enough, there was some “Evil Brown Goo” – I measured about 300-500 mV between the EBG and ground so I knew it had gone bad.  There was one spot that seemed worse than the others, so I took some tweezers and pulled a bit of it out and powered the rig back up – and with that little bit of effort, I noticed an improvement – much less dot display.  I still had bad RX audio, so I decided to pull the PLL board and dig out all the EBG I could.

At first, I thought I could leave the shield in place, but decided I needed better access so I removed it.  I was also going to try to tweeze out all the goo without removing any parts, but there were some parts I couldn’t do that for, so I ended up removing a couple caps, a transistor and the varactor, which was a bit stressful, as it’s now unobtanium.  I also broke a disk ceramic cap and decided to replace a resistor that had gotten a bit beaten up in the de-gooing process.

So after several hours I decided VCO-5 was as clean as I could get it and put the rig back together to see if I needed to dig any deeper.  Amazingly, the rig now sounds great and no indication of PLL unlock on any band.  So, it looks like it was a relatively easy repair as far as the dots go.  I haven’t actually put the rig on the air yet, but I’m enjoying listening to it!

There are a lot of online pages devoted to the repair of the dots problem:  this one by OZ1BXM was my main reference….that and a lot of info included on the TS-440 Yahoo Group.  Thanks to everyone that has documented working on this problem…it allowed even a hack like me to get my old rig going after about 15 years in mothballs!

I’m looking forward to using this one again!