AmateurRadio.com

Just a bit more tidy

Today I took the chance to clean up the radio desk a bit, now that the LP-100A has been removed from the desk and sold I had a chance to rearrange things. I find it so funny that I remove one coax jumper at a time, then move a device  and re-attach the coax jumper and having done this to about 4 radio devices somehow I still end up with something going not where it should. I then have to trouble shoot things to get them back to "normal". Well things are working again and the shack/roll top desk is a little more organized. It was now time to get on the radio and see what was happening out there. I started out on 17m and came across W1AW/5 calling CQ I decided to drop my K3's power down to 500mW's and see how I did. I was able to snag him on the first call which meant it was a 2,211 miles per watt contact!
I then slipped over to 15m and came across V5/DK1CE calling CQ he was running split and it's not very often I try the split thing. It was only once before I was able to make a contact running split. I gave him a go and with about 2 repeats I was able to get into Namibia with 5 watts! I was thrilled to not only make a contact operating split but also to have my MFJ 1788 loop antenna with 5 watts make the trip.  

A shot of the unit

The Telepost LP-100A has been sitting on my desk for to long doing nothing so it's time to sell it and make some ham bucks! I built it myself and it was sent back to Telepost and Larry gave it a check over and calibrated it. For full information on the unit follow this link LP-100A

Some things are better left alone, have you ever had an "are you kidding me" moment! I just went through one that had me take a 2nd and 3rd look along with a refresh button push and a prayer. What caused this frenzee you ask.........it all started with cleaning and good intentions. This evening I was relaxing in bed after an 11 day work shift. Before I drifted off (looking back drifting off would had been a great plan) I wanted to catch up on some blog reading. Having done that and also noticing I had some blogs I follow that have had no activity for over a year I felt it time to delete them......wrong feeling!! Well I ventured into my blog layout page then next to the "blogs I follow" gadget. Once there you have a view of all followed blogs and its here you can delete them or change URL's and so on.  It's kinda idiot proof.............unless you are an idiot!!! So I proceeded to delete my first stale blog once done I returned back to my blog to see if it was removed......it was ALONG WITH ALL BLOGS I FOLLOW!! Ok bloggers out there is there a way to undo this?? To all of you I follow I have not bounced you from the blog on purpose but by having a brain fart.

Large plate capacitor

Over the past few weeks I have been very busy with work and not really anytime for radio or anything else really. I was on the radio for a very short time last week and the weather outside was very humid and HOT! The antenna I have is the MFJ 1788 loop and I have always been able to get a decent SWR on most bands the antenna was designed for. But for some reason I was not able to get an SWR under 2.1:1 on some bands the best I could do was 3.1:1. It turns out that the Humidity can affect the MFJ 1788 antenna and my guess is since the antenna has a large moving plate capacitor the humid air affects the air gap between the plates? The other day the weather was back to cooler non humid conditions and I tried the antenna again and the great SWR was back again. The antenna had not moved and nothing had changed other than the weather.

On Friday (since I had the day off) I felt it was about time to take the Elecraft KX3 and do some portable op's since the weather did not seem like it was going to co-operate once again I operated from the car. I used my mobile whip antennas again and if you remember from my last post I had an error message show up on my radio ERR TXG! Well I tested all the mobile coax and mount  all seemed fine. I did clean the antenna mount connections and this time out all seemed to be well with no error messages. I had about an hour and a half of radio time. I found 20m to be dead with little or no activity I ended staying on 30m but was skunked with regard to contacts. The propagation gods were just not smiling on me this time. The rest of the weekend Julie and I took in the Canadian International air show. On Saturday we were off to Toronto Island it's a short ferry ride into Lake Ontario and in the past this was a great place to get pictures of the air show. This time around it was a good day to sit on the beach and relax with only a few good shots! The Toronto Island for sure was not a good place for photographing the air show as many other would be shutter bugs found out as well. It seems the flight pattern had changed and as Julie pointed out looks like they are flying right over our condo which also is on the lake. On Sunday we went up to the roof top patio on our condo and waited to see what kind of shots we could get. below are the results the cameras used are the Nikon D810 with Nikkor 70-200mm F2.8 glass with a Nikon 2x tele converter I was using the Nikon D800 with Sigma 50-500mm F4.5 glass. The RAF SE5 was about 2 KM's away from us. The C-123 was buzzing a condo that is about 1/2 KM away from us. So not much ham radioing this weekend but I do have Tuesday off as well and you never know I could have the radio god's smiling on me!

RAF SE5 flying past CN Tower

Me on the Island telling Julie I think I see a plane finally

C-123 buzzing a condo about 1/2 KM away

A happy looking KX3

I decided to take the KX3 out and about on my day off Friday, it was an overcast day so I thought it wise to do my operating from the mobile rather than taking the bike. I set up the mobile whip antenna on my car and situated myself in the passenger seat and was ready to go.(note….this time before the trip out I made a list of things to bring so I was not without important items as happened in the past)  Brought the KX3 up to the 20m QRP watering hole (14.060) and just wanted to check the SWR on the radio before sending out my 5 watts of raw power. The KX3 gave me an error message but it seemed I was still able to transmit and I did for a short time. Then I noticed as I moved up and down the band my

Not so happy KX3

SWR stayed the same at 1.4:1 no matter where I was on the band….even up into the SSB portion. It was then determined something was wrong and I had a fast look at the antenna and coax but all seemed ok. I then switched to my 15m whip antenna and the error message was gone but I still had this strange low SWR across the 15m band as well. So it was time to pack things up and head home. Once at home I put the KX3 on a dummy load and tried it out and all was just the way it should be. I then put the rig on the MFJ 1788 loop and again no problems. So I suspect it's the mobile setup and I did post the problem on the Elecraft reflector and was given advice to check the mobile setup. When at home I did want to give the KX3 the full workout and to do so I started to call CQ on 20m. Terry WA0ITP came back to me from Iowa and our signals were in around 339 and conditions wee not that great but we were able to carry on a decent QSO. So the KX3 is working good but it's just another "project" I have on the burner that has to be worked out.  No time today as I am on call  this week and the phone has not stopped ringing with calls for me to go in!

 Julie and I were out this evening taking pictures of the Supermoon. These were taken over Lake Ontario with Toronto peeking through the center photo. The camera was the Nikon D800 and the lenses were the 70-200mm with a 2.0 tele converter and 24-70mm lens. Not really a ham radio post but a great way to spend an August evening.