Should be able to make a couple of decent dipole antennas with these center insulators
Maybe I’ll take that 10m hamfest antenna and put it on one of these.
Dipole centers
Month: February 2014
NC QSO Party 2014
Came across the NC QSO party while tuning around a bit on 40m. Like the TN and SC QSO parties, all the activity I was able to hear was on 40m. Heard a few non-NC stations calling for NC contacts on 20m, but couldn’t hear the stations they were working.
Tuning up and down 40m a few times over the course of the afternoon netted me 23 QSOs and 18 counties including the W1WD bonus station which, according to N1MM logger, was worth 882 points.
Hamfest Balun
The LDG 4:1 balun I picked up at the Charleston Hamfest has definitely seen a fair bit of time out in the weather, it seems. There’s a fair bit of corrosion on the terminals, and some copper oxidation on the wires around the toroid has popped the insulation off in a few places.
Don’t know how the corrosion at the terminals affects things, but I measured DC resistances in the kΩ range between the center and shell of the SO-239 as well as between the two terminals on the balanced end. Looking at the way things are wired in there, I’d have expected it to be a lot lower.
Should be pretty easy to rebuild. Something to add to the project box.
NAQP RTTY 2014 contest
Spent some time playing in the North American QSO Party (RTTY) doing some casual search and pounce-ing (S&P). Made 90 contacts, including a couple operators in MS and one in RI on two bands. Hopefully they’ll upload to LoTW and I can finish off my WAS(Basic).
Most of my contacts were on 20m, and went down to 40m towards the late evening. 54 contacts on 20m and 36 contacts on 40m. The N1MM logger tells me that my contacts were worth 4410 points.
Now that I’ve got another digimode contest under my belt, I think that when it comes to contesting, I think I prefer SSB over digital. The digital mode contesting just doesn’t seem as challenging or entertaining as SSB is. That probably won’t keep me from entering other digimode contests, but when it comes to deciding which ones to participate in, I’ll probably won’t make as much of an effort to participate in digital contests.
A day on 40m PSK
Continuing on with the previous set of experiments, I left the radio listening to 40m PSK at 7.040 MHz.
40m is a very noisy band here, with a lot of random static and noise bursts across the band that make decoding digimodes more difficult.
Activity during the day was pretty sparse, and most of the stations spotted were in the late afternoon/evening hours (local time). Perhaps not a good day for 40m propagation?