Eugene

6m dipole testing

Tested out the 6m dipole with a nice QSO with W4QYV (who happened to be pretty close by) up at 52.525 MHz (FM) and it worked out pretty well except for towards the end when I mysteriously stopped receiving/transmitting anything. The noise was still there, but apparently W4QYV wasn’t hearing me. Very weird.

I was also checking out the JT-65 activity at 50.276 and noticed that the signals there look a lot stronger with the ZS6BKW antenna than they do with the 6m dipole. The ZS6BKW is a good deal higher though and doesn’t have a bunch of houses in the way.

At any rate, I know that it can reach out at least a mile from the house. I was getting a bit concerned after tuning around the band and hearing nothing but noise. Now to decide if I want to leave it up at the house permanently or keep it handy to go portable with. Then again, I have enough wire around, so I could always make another one.

A 6m dipole

Built myself a 6m dipole using a dipole center and some of the hamfest wire I picked up back in February. As it’s also Towel Day, I had mine handy just in case.

I wanted my antenna to be resonant at 51 MHz. Using l = 149.35/f ¹ gave me a length of 2.96m, so I cut a 3m length of wire and then cut that in half. I soldered some stranded wire to one end of each wire to connect to the dipole center and attached a couple of ceramic insulators to the end. One end got tied off against the house and the other end to my PVC mast propped up against a ladder.

The first look with my antenna analyzer showed the antenna resonating around 49.3 MHz with an SWR of 1.0 (wires a bit on the long side). A bit of math (49.3MHz/51MHz = 0.97) told me the antenna needed to be 2.9m long (3.0 * 0.97) so I trimmed 5 cm off each end and got 1.0 SWR right at 51 MHz.

With the dipole connected to the radio, the receive is definitely louder than the ZS6BKW on 6m. I wasn’t able to pick up any other stations, but there was a lot of electronic noise. In the fldigi waterfall, there were lots of periodically spaced vertical lines all across the band. I’ll have to give a listen later when it cools down a bit and people turn off their AC units. Maybe it’ll get better then.

At 2.9m long, it’s small enough to be very easily portable. I’ll need to get a much shorter length of coax to use with it to minimize losses (it’s connected to the radio using about 23m of coax) and something to hold it up in the air. Could be neat to carry this around and break it out when a 6m opening pops up.

1. Take l = 490/f, which gives you the length in feet when f is in MHz, and multiply by 0.3048 to convert to meters. Metric is how I roll.

Achievement Unlocked: WAS/Phone

With W1AW/7 (Nevada) finally showing up in Logbook of the World, I’ve now unlocked the Worked All States(Phone) achievement!

WAS wasn’t something I was actively chasing until the ARRL Centennial QSO Party started up. While chasing the W1AW/n portable stations, I took a closer look at my WAS status and saw that I was getting pretty close, so I decided to start chasing states and working towards the WAS certificate.

These are the calls that helped me get to WAS/Phone (some of you people from Twitter are in here!).

State	Call	State	Call
Alabama	K5WP	Alaska	KL7KY
Arizona	K9WZB	Arkansas	K5PO
California	W6TK	Colorado	K0EU
Connecticut	W1BXY	Delaware	W3MLK
Florida	AJ4RW	Georgia	W4TBJ
Hawaii	NH7A	Idaho	W1AW/7
Illinois	K9CT	Indiana	W9PA
Iowa	W0EA	Kansas	KS0MO
Kentucky	NW4J	Louisiana	KG5VK
Maine	K1IMI	Maryland	W3LL
Massachusetts	WD1S	Michigan	KD8PZO
Minnesota	KD0QEA	Mississippi	W1AW/5
Missouri	WB0LCW	Montana	N9RV
Nebraska	W1AW/0	Nevada	W1AW/7
New Hampshire	N1KWF	New Jersey	K2DBK
New Mexico	WA5ZUP	New York	N2GA
North Carolina	K4OV	North Dakota	KD4POJ
Ohio	WU8R	Oklahoma	K5CM
Oregon	NT7S	Pennsylvania	AA3B
Rhode Island	W1XX	South Carolina	W4LVH
South Dakota	K0VVX	Tennessee	K4EDI
Texas	WR5O	Utah	K7CDX
Vermont	KT1J	Virginia	W4ML
Washington	K7RL	West Virginia	W8MLS
Wisconsin	AA9A	Wyoming	KA7PNH

Now to start working on WAS/Digital. Only 9 states left for that one.

CQ WW 2013 results

Final scores for the CQ WW 2013 contest are available and the 60 828 points I racked up in the Single Op Low Power All Band category got me #819 in the world, #280 in North America and #49 in the US 4th call area. With the Rookie overlay, it puts me at #55 in the world, #19 in North America and #4 in the US 4th call area.

For my first big contest effort, I’m pretty pleased with that.

Tower lowering

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to participate in a tower lowering party this afternoon and met a group of really nice hams in the process. A local business with a 140 foot tower didn’t need it anymore and offered it to anyone for free as long as they took it down. One of the local hams took them up on the offer and today the tower lowering began.

Having no experience with towers, I was eager to see one up close, watch how one gets taken down and do what I could to help out. By the time I got to the site, the antennas and hardlines had already been taken down (a task that took up most of the morning). Here’s the ground crew and two of the guys up on the tower working on undoing the top section.

Lowering a 140' tower — Lowering a 140′ tower

I counted 14 sections of tower, which I was later told was Rohn 45 (commercial grade stuff). The guys climbing the tower were working pretty high up. The top section of the antenna turned out to be pretty stubborn to get off, but eventually it came off and made it onto the ground.

It took the bulk of the afternoon, but eventually three more sections of tower were brought down. I guess after being up for 30 years, those sections of tower get stuck to each other pretty good.

I didn’t do any tower climbing (left that to those more experienced than me) but I did help out on the ground with lowering the sections. As a relatively new ham, it was a great learning experience for me just being able to watch the process. Got to see how a gin pole works, see just how much work it is to take a section down and handled tower sections.

Four sections of tower down, ten more to go. Looking forward to the next session.