Ham radio – Page 24 – AB4UG Radioblog

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?

Straight key base

Finally got around to working on making a base for the straight key. I cut off a section of some 1×4 lumber, sanded it nice and smooth, beveled the edges and covered it with a few coats of clear gloss polyurethane.

For some grippiness so it doesn’t slide around on the desk, I spray-glued a piece of some rubber shelf liner to the bottom.

It’s not a heavy base, and I might decide to change it later on to something more interesting looking. For now, it looks reasonably decent and gives the key a slightly bigger footprint and elevates it a little bit for more comfortable use.

Across the world on 35W

Managed to work another Australian station (VK6WB in Perth, Australia) tonight on 20m PSK using just 35W. According to qrz.com, it’s 18525.7 km away. That’s 1.9 mW/km!

I had to do a double take and wait until he called a couple times to make sure fldigi was decoding it properly. He was as loud as most of the other US stations on the waterfall.

This breaks my previous record for QSO distance (with VK3TDX) by a few thousand km.

Really loving this hobby now.