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A bill has been recently introduced which could result in amateurs losing their currently allocated frequencies on the 70cm band (420-440Mhz). The ARRL is asking that folks write to their legislators to oppose the bill in it’s current form. The FCC is proposing to auction off certain spectrum for commercial use to replace the spectrum given up in the 700Mhz band (formerly used for analog TV) to help make up for the loss of commercial revenue in those bands. The spectrum slated for auction is supposed to be existing Public Safety spectrum (since the 700Mhz block went to Public Safety), but the Amateur allocations appear to have been incorrectly bundled in with those from Public Safety. You can read more about this issue at the ARRL website here and you can read how to help here. Please note that they strongly recommend sending letters to their legislative consultants who will hand-deliver them to Congress due to extensive delays in postal mail screening to members of Congress.

Apologies to those of you outside the US who are reading this US-specific posting.

This past weekend was the ARRL DX CW Contest, one of the biggest contests in all of radiosport. The object of this contest is for stations in the US and Canada to contact stations anywhere else. (In this particular contest, there is no credit for US & Canadian stations to work either country). Contestants may use 6 different bands, 10m, 15m, 20m, 40m, 80m, and 160m. As you might have guessed from the name, this is a CW (morse code) only contest. I’ve done this contest a few times in the past years, and as I’ve become more comfortable with using CW, I’ve participated more. The band conditions for this year looked to be pretty good, with the sun finally starting to wake up from the very long trough between solar cycles 23 and 24. The solar flux remained over 100 for the entire contest, and the sunspot number was over 100 as well for a time, then dropped back to around 79. (This will all be gibberish for non-hams, but for contesters and DXers, this is great news.) I figured that I’d try to spend a reasonable amount of time operating this year, and I wound up spending 17 hours (out of the 48 possible) in front of the radio.

I usually try to set some kind of goal to keep me going, though as I’ve admitted in the past, I tend to do it on the fly; I’ll see where I am at some given point and decide “ok, I can make another 30 contacts before turning in for the night” or “I think I can beat last year’s score”. I really did a lot of “on-the-fly” this year, though I decided after about 3 or 4 hours of operating that I wanted to be sure to beat my score from last year. Last year I wound up with a score of around 160,000 points after deductions for errors, and based on the early going I figured I’d be able to beat that. Not only did I beat it, but I actually doubled it (before error deductions, of course).

Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:    5     5
   80:   53    36
   40:  189    67
   20:  172    68
   15:   81    47
   10:   25    19
-------------------
Total:  525   242  Total Score = 381,150

I should note that this year I entered in the new Single Operator All-Band Assisted Low Power Category (previously any assistance required you to be considered High Power), so comparing this to last year might not be 100% accurate, but I’m still pleased with my showing. I used the packet clusters to help find DX for me, and using the N1MM contesting program, I could easily move from station to station with a couple of keystrokes (or mouse clicks). There was enough activity and the band conditions were good enough that I didn’t have to tune for stations which, while perhaps a bit more “pure” (to some) in terms of the contest, dramatically slows things down in a busy contest like this, where I have to find a station, listen to get a callsign and then decide if I need to work that station. (I should say that I always use the packet cluster spots as a guide, since they are notorious for incorrectly identifying stations. If you log the wrong station callsign, it’s not only bad for you but also for the station that you contacted.)

The nice thing about the good band conditions were that for the most part, once I could hear a station I had little trouble working them. For some of the big stations that attract a lot of callers, it could be difficult, but I’ve learned that those guys will be around for the whole contest and it’s easier to just move off and work someone else, then come back when things are quieter. This is in contrast to a year or two ago when conditions were so bad that even when the other station heard me, or heard “something”, it could take several tries until we were able to both get the correct information that makes up the contact. This time for the most part once the station started a contact with me, we were able to complete it relatively easily. The most significant exception to this was with one station (who I’ll put in here when I can figure out who it was ) who spent almost 4 minutes working with me late at night on 80m to complete the contact. (A normal contact takes anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds, tops.)

Although I didn’t work any “all-time” new countries, I did pick up a few new band-countries: PJ2, V4, XE, and OM on 160, EU on 80, and J5 on 10. (Interestingly, as I was writing this on Sunday evening, the J5, which is Guinea-Bissau, was spotted on 80m and I was able to work him there as well, post-contest.) I was a little surprised that I only worked 87 different countries given the number of overall contacts that I made, but part of that is accounted for by the fact that I worked many, many stations on 2, 3, 4, 5, and even 6 different bands. (I worked PJ2T and V48M on all six, and I believe that’s the first time I’ve ever worked any station on all six contest bands.)

I did have a small visit from Murphy of course: We’ve had a couple of very windy days here, and Sharon commented that she thought she hear my antenna (it’s actually where the ladder line connects to the coaxial feed line) hitting the roof. (That particular portion of the roof is over the room where the TV is.) Sunday morning I took a look outside and realize that my G5RV had dropped about 10 feet from where it should be, the result of the winds blowing. I have it connected via bungee cords in such a way that they’ll take up some slack, but after a while it will drop a bit from the constant “pulling”. Fortunately, it was easy to fix and just required a quick trip up the ladder to both ends of the antenna to pull it back up and things were back to normal.

So, now that I’ve completed this blog entry, that wraps up my post-contest activities, having submitted my log to the ARRL, uploaded my contacts to Logbook of the World, eqsl, and Clublog, and submitted my score to the 3830 contesting reflector.

Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t published anything here for a bit over a month. I was also pretty much absent from several of the other “social web” places that I frequent (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and in fact got a couple of private notes asking if everything was OK. (Thanks to those who asked for your concern.) The short version is that everything is just fine. Here’s the longer version:

Around a week after I published my last update, I managed to come down with a kidney stone just about a year after the last time I had one. I’ll skip the details, but suffice it to say that I wasn’t very comfortable for a while and blogging, ham radio, and pretty much everything else not essential to feeling better got put aside. Complicating things was the fact that along with Sharon, Justin, and Brett, I was supposed to leave for vacation on the evening of December 25th, and the doctor was pretty adamant that I shouldn’t be traveling unless I had passed the stone. Fortunately, it did pass just a couple of days before that, and given everything we had to do before leaving I never had time to do an update.

The trip itself was something we’d planned for a long, long time, figuring that with the kids getting older (they are both in college), it would become increasingly difficult for all of us to get away. Our trip started in Barcelona where we spend three days sightseeing followed by a twelve-day Mediterranean cruise with stops in Palermo, Athens, Rhodes, Alexandria/Cairo, and Malta. I’m not going to go into detail here about the trip, but I did want to post a couple of pictures that are on topic for this blog.

First, as we were driving from Cairo to the pyramids in Giza, I looked out the window of the bus and saw this antenna. Actually, although I didn’t notice it at the time, in addition to the beam that’s right in the middle of the picture, there’s also what appears to be a wire dipole just to the right of that. Unfortunately, I don’t know specifically where this picture was taken other than we were in Cairo at the time, so I don’t know who that might belong to. (Any Egyptian hams reading this?)

I know exactly who the next antenna belongs to: The Malta Amateur Radio League.  I know this because just a second or two before I took this picture, we passed a big sign that said “Malta Amateur Radio League”. Unfortunately, we were on a bus driving from the city of Mdina to the capital city of Valleta, so I couldn’t stop to get a picture of the sign, but I did get a picture of the antenna on the roof of their building. I apologize for the lousy picture but I’m glad that I was able to even get this shot before we had completely driven past. We only had six hours in Malta, so I didn’t have a chance to try to get back to the MARL shack to see if there was anyone around, but I can say that Malta was absolutely beautiful and I hope to get back there some day for a longer visit.

I guess I should mention that I didn’t do any ham radio while we were away at all. We had a very tight schedule almost everywhere other than some very relaxing days at sea, and given the difficulties of transporting gear with me (in addition to everything else we brought), licensing, and the fact that unfortunately Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines explicitly prohibits the use of ham radio on board the ship, I decided that it didn’t make much sense to try to operate. As a result, it was just over a month between the last HF contact I made in December (before I was ill), and the next one that I made in January after I returned.

You might want to read Part I of this if you haven’t done so already. It’ll be a lot less confusing that way.

After we got the far-end rope over the correct limb, we tied off one end of the new G5RV and pulled it up in the air a bit just to make sure that we didn’t run into any unexpected issues. That went well, so we moved to the near-end tree to attach the other end to that rope, which I’d lowered before David and Matthew arrived. We attached the other end of the G5RV to the rope and I started to pull it up, but the insulator at the end snagged on a branch and we couldn’t get the antenna up nearly high enough. We dropped the antenna down to the ground and tried to use the rope itself as a kind of saw to see if we could break off the very small branch that was causing the problem. After about 5 or 10 minutes, we realized that 1) It was getting dark enough that we were having trouble seeing where the rope was going, and 2) The cold wind that had been blowing all afternoon wasn’t stopping, and with the lack of sun it had gone from chilly to “ok, we’ve just about had enough of this” cold. It was time for plan B.

Several years ago, when having some work done on that “near-end” tree, I had the tree service put a pulley with some rope as high as they could up in the tree. I’ve played with it a few times trying some wire antennas, but hadn’t used it at all for the last year or two. I figured that at least temporarily we could attach the remaining end of the G5RV to that rope to get it up into the air. If needed, Matthew could come back another time and try to get a rope over a higher branch with the potato gun, but there wasn’t enough light to try that. (The reason why I didn’t want to use the pulley permanently was because it wasn’t all that high up in the tree, plus I didn’t want to lose the use of that for any future experiments.) That worked out pretty well, and David, K2DSL, was nice enough to volunteer to head up to the roof to connect the antenna to the feedline. Next, it was into the shack to see if the antenna would load up (and to warm up!), which it did. I made sure that the tuner would be able to find a match as it had with the old antenna and was able to do so on all bands. By that point, we were all exhausted and cold, so after thanking Matthew and David they left. I did a little cleanup outside and headed in. I made one quick QSO (KP2B on 40m CW) just to make sure that the antenna actually worked, then headed out for dinner with Sharon.

The next morning I figured that I’d see what things actually looked like, and I was disappointed when I realized that the antenna was even lower than I’d thought. The pulley just wasn’t very high up in the tree, and my G5RV was nowhere near a “flat-top” installation. I figured that I’d take a look at the other rope to see if I could do anything with it, hoping that perhaps “something” had happened overnight that might allow me to use it instead of the lower-than-expected pulley rope. It seems that I finally got a little break: I got both ends of the old rope and pulled back and forth to see if the resistance caused by that little branch was any less. As soon as I did, I saw a small piece of ice drop off from where the rope was wrapped around the branch, followed by a small piece of a branch. I think that what happened was that the rope rubbing the night before had allowed some sap to get onto the branch, which froze overnight and must have caused the branch to break. As a result, the little branch that was not allowing the insulator to move when pulled up into the tree was no longer in the way.

I dropped down the antenna from the “pulley rope” (which required me to toss the throw bag over the antenna wire, and carefully pull it down) and attached it to the older rope, and pulled it up. It took a little bit of work, but I was able to get it back up to nearly the original height. I spent about another 30 minutes more permanently tying off the ends of the rope, including connecting the ends to bungee cords that I use as shock absorbers before heading inside. I was able to make a few DX contacts on several bands, and in the week since then, I’ve actually picked up a couple of new countries on 80m (Iceland and Faroe Islands) as well as some new bands or modes for other countries (Congo on 20m phone and CW and 17m RTTY, Gabon on 20m CW, and Dominica on 40m RTTY, among others), so I guess the antenna is working well.

I’m still not very happy with the mechanical connections, and in particular, the connection from the ladderline to the coax feedline. I don’t think they are nearly as sturdy as the antenna that I replaced, but I hope that what’s there now will work out until the spring. At that point I want to replace some of what I think are the weak points with something sturdier. I may also look into other types of antennas, but for now, I’m very happy to be back on the air.

You might want to read Part I of this if you haven’t done so already. It’ll be a lot less confusing that way.

After we got the far-end rope over the correct limb, we tied off one end of the new G5RV and pulled it up in the air a bit just to make sure that we didn’t run into any unexpected issues. That went well, so we moved to the near-end tree to attach the other end to that rope, which I’d lowered before David and Matthew arrived. We attached the other end of the G5RV to the rope and I started to pull it up, but the insulator at the end snagged on a branch and we couldn’t get the antenna up nearly high enough. We dropped the antenna down to the ground and tried to use the rope itself as a kind of saw to see if we could break off the very small branch that was causing the problem. After about 5 or 10 minutes, we realized that 1) It was getting dark enough that we were having trouble seeing where the rope was going, and 2) The cold wind that had been blowing all afternoon wasn’t stopping, and with the lack of sun it had gone from chilly to “ok, we’ve just about had enough of this” cold. It was time for plan B.

Several years ago, when having some work done on that “near-end” tree, I had the tree service put a pulley with some rope as high as they could up in the tree. I’ve played with it a few times trying some wire antennas, but hadn’t used it at all for the last year or two. I figured that at least temporarily we could attach the remaining end of the G5RV to that rope to get it up into the air. If needed, Matthew could come back another time and try to get a rope over a higher branch with the potato gun, but there wasn’t enough light to try that. (The reason why I didn’t want to use the pulley permanently was because it wasn’t all that high up in the tree, plus I didn’t want to lose the use of that for any future experiments.) That worked out pretty well, and David, K2DSL, was nice enough to volunteer to head up to the roof to connect the antenna to the feedline. Next, it was into the shack to see if the antenna would load up (and to warm up!), which it did. I made sure that the tuner would be able to find a match as it had with the old antenna and was able to do so on all bands. By that point, we were all exhausted and cold, so after thanking Matthew and David they left. I did a little cleanup outside and headed in. I made one quick QSO (KP2B on 40m CW) just to make sure that the antenna actually worked, then headed out for dinner with Sharon.

The next morning I figured that I’d see what things actually looked like, and I was disappointed when I realized that the antenna was even lower than I’d thought. The pulley just wasn’t very high up in the tree, and my G5RV was nowhere near a “flat-top” installation. I figured that I’d take a look at the other rope to see if I could do anything with it, hoping that perhaps “something” had happened overnight that might allow me to use it instead of the lower-than-expected pulley rope. It seems that I finally got a little break: I got both ends of the old rope and pulled back and forth to see if the resistance caused by that little branch was any less. As soon as I did, I saw a small piece of ice drop off from where the rope was wrapped around the branch, followed by a small piece of a branch. I think that what happened was that the rope rubbing the night before had allowed some sap to get onto the branch, which froze overnight and must have caused the branch to break. As a result, the little branch that was not allowing the insulator to move when pulled up into the tree was no longer in the way.

I dropped down the antenna from the “pulley rope” (which required me to toss the throw bag over the antenna wire, and carefully pull it down) and attached it to the older rope, and pulled it up. It took a little bit of work, but I was able to get it back up to nearly the original height. I spent about another 30 minutes more permanently tying off the ends of the rope, including connecting the ends to bungee cords that I use as shock absorbers before heading inside. I was able to make a few DX contacts on several bands, and in the week since then, I’ve actually picked up a couple of new countries on 80m (Iceland and Faroe Islands) as well as some new bands or modes for other countries (Congo on 20m phone and CW and 17m RTTY, Gabon on 20m CW, and Dominica on 40m RTTY, among others), so I guess the antenna is working well.

I’m still not very happy with the mechanical connections, and in particular, the connection from the ladderline to the coax feedline. I don’t think they are nearly as sturdy as the antenna that I replaced, but I hope that what’s there now will work out until the spring. At that point I want to replace some of what I think are the weak points with something sturdier. I may also look into other types of antennas, but for now, I’m very happy to be back on the air.

As I wrote about last week, my G5RV antenna came down as the result of a storm. My original plan was to try to repair the existing antenna, but after examining it further, I decided that I’d be better off buying a replacement which is exactly what I did. (I’ll look at fixing the old one one of these days.) Matthew, K2NUD, and David, K2DSL, volunteered to come over last Saturday to help me get the antenna up in air, so we planned to meet at my house at around 2:30 which would give me enough time to run out to KJI Electronics to pick up the new antenna. The one that they had in stock from from MFJ and while it didn’t seem to be build as sturdily as what I’d had in the air, I figured that getting some copper in the air was better than nothing.

Throw bag

The old antenna was suspended between two trees with the farthest end being at probably 60 or 70 feet in the air. (I’m terrible at estimating height, but I know that it’s significantly higher than the roof of my house, which is at about 35 feet or so.) The antenna snapped at the far end, leaving the line suspending it about 50 feet in the air and somewhat tangled in the branches. As a result, it wasn’t possible to get to that rope to re-use it, so Matthew came up with a better plan: a potato gun. The link tells you lots about potato guns, but in a nutshell, this is a gun made from PVC pipe that’s used to fire a potato. (Why would you do that? Because it’s unbelievably fun!) In order to get the potato to do something other than just shoot up in the air (and make a pretty cool sound), we put the throw bag which trailed 100 feet of line on top of the potato which worked like a champ.

The way the potato gun works is that you put the “fuel” (old-fashioned non-environmentally friendly Aqua-Net hairspray) into a chamber and ignite it which forces a potato, previously jammed down the barrel, up and out of the barrel at a pretty high rate of speed. In the picture here, Matthew (green jacket) is holding the gun while I spray in the “fuel” into the combustion chamber. That’s David on the left. Somewhere out there I’m sure someone has done some calculations about amount of force that’s being generated to launch the potato that far (not to mention the added one-pound throw bag), but physics aside, as I mentioned earlier, it’s fun to watch.

It took a few tries, but Matthew managed to get the line over the right branch, which is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Although made somewhat easier by the fact that there are no leaves on the trees at this time of the year, it’s still a lot like threading a needle that’s about 50 feet away and 75 feet in the air. We came close a couple of times, but Matthew wanted to keep trying to get it exactly right, which I think was an excuse to fire off a few more shots. There’s more to the story which I’ll talk about in Part II, but here’s a video taken by my son Justin during one of the “firings”. (If you’re reading this in an RSS reader or email and can’t see the video, you click here to go directly to the video on YouTube.)

As I wrote about last week, my G5RV antenna came down as the result of a storm. My original plan was to try to repair the existing antenna, but after examining it further, I decided that I’d be better off buying a replacement which is exactly what I did. (I’ll look at fixing the old one one of these days.) Matthew, K2NUD, and David, K2DSL, volunteered to come over last Saturday to help me get the antenna up in air, so we planned to meet at my house at around 2:30 which would give me enough time to run out to KJI Electronics to pick up the new antenna. The one that they had in stock from from MFJ and while it didn’t seem to be build as sturdily as what I’d had in the air, I figured that getting some copper in the air was better than nothing.

Throw bag

The old antenna was suspended between two trees with the farthest end being at probably 60 or 70 feet in the air. (I’m terrible at estimating height, but I know that it’s significantly higher than the roof of my house, which is at about 35 feet or so.) The antenna snapped at the far end, leaving the line suspending it about 50 feet in the air and somewhat tangled in the branches. As a result, it wasn’t possible to get to that rope to re-use it, so Matthew came up with a better plan: a potato gun. The link tells you lots about potato guns, but in a nutshell, this is a gun made from PVC pipe that’s used to fire a potato. (Why would you do that? Because it’s unbelievably fun!) In order to get the potato to do something other than just shoot up in the air (and make a pretty cool sound), we put the throw bag which trailed 100 feet of line on top of the potato which worked like a champ.

The way the potato gun works is that you put the “fuel” (old-fashioned non-environmentally friendly Aqua-Net hairspray) into a chamber and ignite it which forces a potato, previously jammed down the barrel, up and out of the barrel at a pretty high rate of speed. In the picture here, Matthew (green jacket) is holding the gun while I spray in the “fuel” into the combustion chamber. That’s David on the left. Somewhere out there I’m sure someone has done some calculations about amount of force that’s being generated to launch the potato that far (not to mention the added one-pound throw bag), but physics aside, as I mentioned earlier, it’s fun to watch.

It took a few tries, but Matthew managed to get the line over the right branch, which is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Although made somewhat easier by the fact that there are no leaves on the trees at this time of the year, it’s still a lot like threading a needle that’s about 50 feet away and 75 feet in the air. We came close a couple of times, but Matthew wanted to keep trying to get it exactly right, which I think was an excuse to fire off a few more shots. There’s more to the story which I’ll talk about in Part II, but here’s a video taken by my son Justin during one of the “firings”. (If you’re reading this in an RSS reader or email and can’t see the video, you click here to go directly to the video on YouTube.)

It was bound to happen sooner or later, but that doesn’t really make it feel any better. At the edge of my backyard there is a tree that I was pretty sure had died (given the lack of leaves through the past spring and summer), and I’d planned on having a tree service look at it next  spring. A series of rainstorms with a lot of wind passed through my part of the world yesterday (I’ll bet you can guess where this is going). One of the three small trunks from that dead tree snapped off about 8 feet in the air and fortunately fell parallel to my house so the house was OK. Unfortunately, my G5RV antenna passed through the upper branches of the tree and unsurprisingly was unable to withstand the force of the falling tree. The image you see to the right is a piece of one of the wire legs that use to be up in the air. It is, alas, no longer up in the air.

The force of the stress on the wire not only snapped one of the wire legs but also pulled hard enough to break the solder joints at the insulator where the bare wire connects to the ladder line, as you can see in the next photo.  Both ends of the soldered joint were broken, but the non-broken wire leg appears to be OK otherwise and is still attached to the “near end” tree where it was originally attached. The remaining few feet of the other leg appear to have snapped back after breaking and look to be up in the branches of the other supporting tree at probably around 50 feet in the air. I’m hoping that I can get a line over that and pull it down, since that way I can use the existing rope (which is still over a nice high branch) to support the replacement.

For at least the short-term, I am going to try to salvage what’s there. Although this has been up in the air for over 10 years (I didn’t think it was that long, but I realized that every HF QSO that I’ve made from my home station starting in August 2000 has been on that antenna) the other parts of the antenna seem to be in fine shape. (And it was certainly working very well until it came down.) The G5RV is, without question, a compromise antenna, but in the 10 years that I’ve been using it  I’ve managed to work all states, all zones, and gotten DXCC on all bands from 10m to 80m (I still need a few more confirmations for 30m) and on all three modes, and have worked 300+ DXCC entities using this compromise. Would I like a tower with a nice Steppir on it? Sure, but that’s not happening anytime soon, so I’ll stick to what I know works. I have another G5RV that a friend gave me before he moved out of the country, and while I need to verify that the wire is the correct length, it’s been sitting in my garage out of the elements and the wire legs look like perfect candidates for a “transplant”.  The big advantage of repairing what’s there is that it will be zero cost and with a little luck, I should be able to get it done over the weekend.

If I can’t repair it for whatever reason, then most likely I’ll run over to KJI Electronics and pick up a new one and put it up in the same place. I have discussed with some friends the possibility of replacing this with something like an Alpha-Delta DX-CC or possibly even an Alpha-Delta DX-LB Plus (I have the horizontal room, the question is whether I can get it high up enough to function properly), but for now I think I’m going to stick with what I know works.

I hope to have an update with good news soon, stay tuned.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, but that doesn’t really make it feel any better. At the edge of my backyard there is a tree that I was pretty sure had died (given the lack of leaves through the past spring and summer), and I’d planned on having a tree service look at it next  spring. A series of rainstorms with a lot of wind passed through my part of the world yesterday (I’ll bet you can guess where this is going). One of the three small trunks from that dead tree snapped off about 8 feet in the air and fortunately fell parallel to my house so the house was OK. Unfortunately, my G5RV antenna passed through the upper branches of the tree and unsurprisingly was unable to withstand the force of the falling tree. The image you see to the right is a piece of one of the wire legs that use to be up in the air. It is, alas, no longer up in the air.

The force of the stress on the wire not only snapped one of the wire legs but also pulled hard enough to break the solder joints at the insulator where the bare wire connects to the ladder line, as you can see in the next photo.  Both ends of the soldered joint were broken, but the non-broken wire leg appears to be OK otherwise and is still attached to the “near end” tree where it was originally attached. The remaining few feet of the other leg appear to have snapped back after breaking and look to be up in the branches of the other supporting tree at probably around 50 feet in the air. I’m hoping that I can get a line over that and pull it down, since that way I can use the existing rope (which is still over a nice high branch) to support the replacement.

For at least the short-term, I am going to try to salvage what’s there. Although this has been up in the air for over 10 years (I didn’t think it was that long, but I realized that every HF QSO that I’ve made from my home station starting in August 2000 has been on that antenna) the other parts of the antenna seem to be in fine shape. (And it was certainly working very well until it came down.) The G5RV is, without question, a compromise antenna, but in the 10 years that I’ve been using it  I’ve managed to work all states, all zones, and gotten DXCC on all bands from 10m to 80m (I still need a few more confirmations for 30m) and on all three modes, and have worked 300+ DXCC entities using this compromise. Would I like a tower with a nice Steppir on it? Sure, but that’s not happening anytime soon, so I’ll stick to what I know works. I have another G5RV that a friend gave me before he moved out of the country, and while I need to verify that the wire is the correct length, it’s been sitting in my garage out of the elements and the wire legs look like perfect candidates for a “transplant”.  The big advantage of repairing what’s there is that it will be zero cost and with a little luck, I should be able to get it done over the weekend.

If I can’t repair it for whatever reason, then most likely I’ll run over to KJI Electronics and pick up a new one and put it up in the same place. I have discussed with some friends the possibility of replacing this with something like an Alpha-Delta DX-CC or possibly even an Alpha-Delta DX-LB Plus (I have the horizontal room, the question is whether I can get it high up enough to function properly), but for now I think I’m going to stick with what I know works.

I hope to have an update with good news soon, stay tuned.

In contrast to my giving up the frequency for a DX station while in the middle of a “run” during a contest (as I recently mentioned), I heard a particularly bad bit of operating on last Sunday while trying to work Bob, VP8LP in the Falkland Islands. I’ve worked Bob before on several bands but needed a contact from him on 15m. He had an excellent signal and was steadily working stations, the vast majority of which were good operators, standing by when Bob was working another station and not responding when Bob wasn’t calling them. (Please see my post about The DX Code of Conduct if you haven’t already.) There was, unfortunately, one exception to the “good guys” on the frequency.

As Bob was steadily working the pile, a ham started calling K7NRA on the frequency. After he did this once or twice, assuming that perhaps he was unaware that there was another station on the frequency, I responded to him and said that the frequency was in use and gave my callsign. (The other ham was using his callsign, or what I presume was his, though I neglected to note it. While normally I don’t like to “pick on” people in a public forum, what was going on was heard by dozens of other hams, and if I could remember what it was, I’d post it here.) The other ham said “Well, there’s supposed to be a special event for K7NRA on this frequency and I’m going to call him, this is his announced frequency”.

It was pretty clear that the guy calling wasn’t hearing K7NRA, and aside from that fact that he refused to stop interfering with an active frequency, his general technique was awful. He was calling “blind” (meaning he didn’t hear the other station), and kept calling “CQ CQ CQ CQ CQ CQ K7NRA”, which doesn’t actually make a lot of sense. CQ generally means “calling all stations”, thus saying “CQ K7NRA” means “calling all stations with a callsign of K7NRA”; by definition there will only be one. There are exceptions to using a “directed CQ”, such as when calling “CQ DX” (looking for any DX station) or “CQ NJ” (looking for a station in New Jersey), but proper procedure when calling a particular station is to simply call the station. If I were to call that station, I’d say “K7NRA this is K2DBK” or, if K7NRA was listening for other stations, I would likely just give my callsign only.

Several other stations responded to the caller (some more politely, and some, unfortunately much less so), and he refused to move, insisting that he had “as much right to the frequency as anyone”. Unless he had an emergency (which clearly was not the case), what he said was not true. The FCC rules governing the amateur radio service state that nobody can “own” a particular frequency (including by “publishing” use of a particular frequency at a particular time), and further, if any frequency is in use, with the exception of use in an emergency, nobody is required to relinquish the frequency for another station. Thus, the caller was not only wrong, but he was violating the rule that says “No amateur operator shall willfully or maliciously interfere with or cause interference to any radio communication or signal.”

The guy would not give up, and continued to attempt to call K7NRA repeatedly. The worst of it was when one station was speaking with Bob, and was showing ham radio to a young Boy Scout for the first time. All the others stations on the frequency patiently stood by while Bob spoke with the youngster, all except the guy calling K7NRA, who simply wouldn’t stop. Several hams were telling him (in language that probably violated another part of the FCC rules) exactly what they thought of him, to no avail. While this was happening, it occurred to me what a terrible impression this was making on the young Scout. Is this how we want to entice others into our hobby?

After the contact with the scout was over, Bob, who could hear the guy calling the K7 station, finally said “The station calling CQ, this is VP8LP, please go ahead”. That did the trick, the station stopped calling. Bob called several more times with no response, and finally said “well, I guess I’ve figured out how to shut him up!” and went back to working the pileup.

I would like to say that Bob’s comment had a permanent effect, but unfortunately that was not the case. The caller kept coming back, Bob would respond to the “gentleman calling CQ”, which would usually shut him up for a while, and so on. This went on for a while, with the occasional argument back and forth between the guy calling K7 and others on the frequency, until finally propagation changed enough that he was no longer heard on the frequency.

After this was over, I did a little research to see what “special event” he was talking about, since an initial check of the spot clusters didn’t show any activity for K7NRA. After a little digging I discovered that in fact the Yavapai Amateur Radio Club was, in fact, doing a special event to celebrate the “birthday” of the NRA, as described on their website. The frequency occupied by VP8LP was also one of the frequencies advertised (21.355mHz), but what our caller failed to notice was that the event was scheduled for the 17th of November, not the 14th of November, when this all occurred. This caller was not only wrong from a legal and ethical standpoint, he managed to get a lot of people annoyed at him by trying to work an activity that wasn’t even happening. As they say, you can’t outlaw stupidity.