The battery is charging and my Lowepro 150 with the KX3 station is ready and raring to go for FOBB tomorrow.

I sincerely hope the weather is better tomorrow, compared to today.  We’ve had heavy, gray, overcast skies all day.  It was threatening to rain all day and in fact, did. from about 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM or so.  No heavy downpours; but if I were outside operating, it would have been enough to force me indoors.

This afternoon, I was able to break the pileup and work 2012L, the Olympics Special Event station on 17 Meters.  I heard them again tonight on 30 Meters; but their signal was not as strong as on 17 Meters this afternoon.

So I decided to frustrate myself for a while and try to bust the pileup working CY9M on 30 Meters.  The pileup covered a 10 kHz patch of spectrum and after a while, I realized I wasn’t going to cut it this night with 5 Watts.  I have worked St. Paul Island years ago; but never QRP.  They’re there till Wednesday, so I have a few more times to give it a shot.  I have them for DXCC credit already, so if I don’t get them in the log, I won’t lose any sleep.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

When I’m out and about, I often pop the FT-817 and a couple of antennas in a bag. For 50MHz, I use the ATX-Walkabout antenna, although I noticed today that the SWR is a bit high on the band and I’m not sure why. It’s usable though, particularly if there is Es around.

The other antenna I use quite a bit is the MP-1 antenna. I use it with the FT-817, mostly on CW from 7MHz up to 28MHz. I mentioned on Twitter this morning that I used it and immediately got a couple of ‘what do you think of the MP-1’ comments, seemingly with the subtext of ‘I have one but I don’t get on with it’.

I’m sure a dipole would work better but the MP-1 is very convenient and goes together quickly and seems to me to perform well. It’s essentially a ‘screwdriver’ style antenna. I’ve had my MP-1 for around 10 years now and perhaps the connection onto the coil is not so great now. I sometimes have to fiddle with it a bit to get a good connection, but it’s easily sorted. On 7 MHz with the ribbon radials, it’s quite tricky to tune up, but once you get it into the zone, it’s fine. I worked MM0CPS/P on Tiree this morning running 3W CW to the MP-1. On the higher bands, tuning is easy.

I don’t have the tripod kit, so I usually clamp the antenna to a bench or table. There’s usually something around. I keep meaning to try a photographic tripod, but haven’t checked the fittings yet to see if they are compatible.

The FT-817 is quite heavy on batteries, so if I plan to operate for more than a half our or so, I use my Pentaflex power station (high capacity 12v supply). This is very useful which I actually got to power my telescope, but use it more often for radio and other purposes. I did notice that the PSU made a bit of interference on 28MHz, but moving the PSU away from the antenna solved that.

As I’ve reflected before, contacts with this sort of equipment feels more of an achievement than with bigger equipment and is, therefore, more satisfying I think.

Happy portable operating!

I tell ya!

I had a virtual pipeline into Northern Europe tonight on 20 Meters.  I worked Latvia, Denmark and a whole bunch of Ham friends from European Russia.  I was consistently getting 579 reports, and I will take those at face value.  Whenever I don’t get that automatic “599”, I figure any other report is probably pretty honest.

Hey, 5 Watts to the Butternut and I’m getting 579 from over across all that water that’s separating us?  I’ll take THAT any day of the week! If I wasn’t so tired from work, I’d do the Happy Dance.

I’ve got a bunch of yard work planned for tomorrow, so that I can have Sunday free for Flight of the Bumblebees.  Fresh air, trees, sunshine, wire and a radio.  You can’t beat that with a stick!

Since portable ops seems to be the thing that a lot of folks associate with QRP, I’m attempting to boil the essence of that down into a design for a T-shirt.   This is what I’ve come up with so far:

I’ve put this design on some stuff at Cafe Press.  I think I’ll order myself up a few shirts so that I can wear them while I’m Skeeter hunting (too late for FOBB).  I’ll have to see if I can’t find a real graphic artist who can improve on the execution of my idea – but for now – not too shabby (at least I think so!)

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

I still seem to be getting e-mails asking me if I would issue Bee numbers for Flight of the Bumblebees this coming Sunday.  Once again, I am NOT “The Beekeeper” this year; but this is how you go about getting one:

1) Visit http://bit.ly/LsxX2Y to check out the database of Bee numbers already issued.

2) Come up with a number you would like to use, with two alternates.

3) Send an e-mail to: [email protected]

4) Include your Bee number choices as well as your first name, your callsign, and where you plan to be operating from.

5) Keep checking the database, because if you’re like me, your callsign will just show up with your Bee number.  I didn’t get an e-mail back from KI6SN with that information, I saw it on the database after it was issued.  (BTW, my Bee number is 17, in honor of Keith Hernandez, one of the best 1st Basemen to play the game of baseball).

Good luck and hope to hear you on the air on Sunday!

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

And from the looks of this video, Mt. Herman in Colorado is as beautiful as ever!

Welcome to Handiham World.

Troubleshooting 101

Here is an interesting little problem that showed up in my own ham shack just a few weeks ago. It’s funny how we can run into things that seem not quite right but then sort of just shrug them off and say, “Oh, well.”
The problem showed up when I was using my shack’s two meter rig, which is powered by a switching power supply.  It’s the one that’s typically used for the Handiham net each day. I’m located some distance from the N0BVE repeater system. (It’s in the western part of the Twin Cities Metro while I am in the east.)  That means my reception of the N0BVE signal is not exactly perfect.  I can hear an annoying hiss in the background when the repeater is active, but that’s easily eliminated with a flip of the switch on my external ClearSpeech speaker. This handy device has almost magical properties – really a very smart algorithm – that digitally cleans up the signal, virtually eliminating the noise. I don’t like to leave it turned on all the time because I also enjoy listening to Minnesota Public Radio with the extended receive feature of the transceiver, and MPR has enough signal to be rock-solid perfect. It sounds best with the external ClearSpeech speaker’s processing turned off.
One day I encountered an interesting problem. I had been listening to MPR when I last used the radio, and when I turned it on, that’s the station I heard. Since I wanted to monitor the repeater instead, I flipped the memory to the stored two meter channel. Then, noticing that the ClearSpeech speaker was turned off, I slid its power switch to “on”. At that very moment, the radio went dead – no power. I pushed the power button on the radio and everything was back to normal. I put up with this for weeks before finally getting the gumption to track it down.
Can you guess what was going on?
Email me at [email protected] with your questions & comments.   
Patrick Tice, WA0TDA
Handiham Manager

Handiham remote base station report

W0EQO at Courage North is in service and performing well. W0ZSW is off line due to internet connectivity issues that make it too unreliable to use. I hope to address this issue soon. Luckily, propagation has been excellent via W0EQO for PICONET, a regional HF 75 meter net on 3.925 MHz.