And so it begins

The coax going out to my Hustler 4BTV antenna has been with me for a very long time. I would say it is at least 14 years old or more. I felt now that the summer is here and I have some spare time on my hands, it was time to change it out. I did not want to wait for it to start failing, as you know, would be either during a contest in which I was doing better than I ever have or in the dead of winter. This coaxial cable is RG-8X, and it has been performing great without any issues. I will be replacing it with brand-new RG-213 coax, which is slightly larger in diameter and more efficient than the RG-8X. Now, my run is only 40 feet, but RG-213 seemed more robust. 

The old coax RG-8X is underground about 3 feet deep and was placed in a flexible plastic conduit that is used for running electrical wire in a concrete slab during construction. The plan was to cut off the PL 259 on the RG-8X, attach a string to it and pull the RG-8X out of the tubing, leaving the string to be used to pull the RG-213 back through the pipe. Being an electrician and pulling my fair share of cables in metal conduit, metal flex and plastic flex piping, there are some very important things to remember. This is a short run, so a string was fine, but most often it is a fiberglass fish tape. 

Secure at one pulling medium at one end

Anyway....next is to make sure whatever you use to pull the cable, that it is not going to come off as you're pulling. It has happened to me, and it is a sinking feeling, and you have to start all over again. Next, when you are pulling something like thick RG-213, make sure you do not fasten the puling rope to the outside of the coax and then tape it up and start pulling. Because with the pulling rope on one side of the wire or coax cable being pulled, it has a tendency to face downward and rub along the pipe or in my case, the ribbed plastic piping. This will cause the coax to constantly get jammed, and when you are alone, that means going to the other end to pull it back and back to the pulling end....and back and forth. In the case of coax, strip it down to the center conductor and attach the pull string, fish cable or wire to that. This will allow the cable being pulled to stay in the center of the pipe. Finally, if you are using a string as your pulling medium or wire, make sure you absolutely secure the opposite end to something. I have not secured it from time to time, and what happens is that you "think" you have enough string to make it through the pipe. You then go to the other end and start pulling the old coax out, then you remove the string, fasten it to the center conductor of the new coax to be pulled back. You then venture to the other end to pull on the string, and it's GONE! It turns out it was not long enough. As you pulled the old cable out it's now in the pipe, and good luck getting another string fish line through you better have a fiberglass flexible fish. To stop this from happening secure the string at the opposite end, then as you pull, and things come to a sudden stop, you can go to the other end, see that the string has reached its limit, and you can add more. 

Let's talk about putting the good old PL-259 on the coax. I am sure all of us have done this at one time or another, but first, ALWAYS put the barrel on the coax, the part of the PL-259 that threads the PL-259 in place when you connect to the radio. I have in the past done a great job at soldering, and then to realize the threaded barrel is not on the coax! 

Make sure it on and in right direction

 Oh, and another side note, make sure it is right side up, as yup, I have placed it on the wrong side in the past, and it was upside down! Once the barrel is on the coax, put your PL-257 beside the coax with the tip at the top edge of the coax. Now, make note of where the small threaded section on the PL-259 is in relation to the coax. It is at this spot that you will be removing only the outer plastic from the RG-213. I use a razor knife with a brand-new blade to do this. Go slow and carefully, not to cut or nick the braid. I have seen tools to do this, but I just do not do enough connectors to justify the piece. 

Jacket removed at threaded section

With the braid now exposed, your next step will be to solder all or for sure most of it. 

Braid soldered

Get your connector again and lay it beside the soldered braid section again, lining up the tip of the PL-259 with the top of the RG-213. Make note of where the plastic section starts that insulates the center conductor from the shell. Using your razor knife again, cut into the tinned braid to remove the braid and the center plastic, exposing the center conductor. Again, be careful not to nick the center conductor. If done correctly, you will have a nice, clean break between the braid, the plastic insulator and the center conductor. 

Braid and plastic removed

At this point, I will solder tin to the center conductor so it does not come apart while inserting the PL-259.  

It's now time to put the PL-259 body on the coax, and with RG-213, there is no reducer to worry about, as the PL-259 will screw onto the coax. Before you begin this, what I do is I place the PL-259 body beside the prepared coax. I line it up as if it were installed on the coax. I do this so it shows me where the PL-259 will stop on the coax when it is fully seated. At this spot, I place a piece of electrical tape so I know where to stop. I have heard stories where the op keeps turning the PL-259 body onto the coax, and suddenly the plastic insulator between the center conductor and body dislodges from the main body. 

Stop mark when installing PL-259

With the PL-259 fully seated, it is time to again check to make sure you put the threaded part of the connector on the coax and that it is right side up. Then you can solder the braid and center conductor. For this, I have my Weller soldering station on high with the largest tip. 

PL-259 on and ready to be soldered

After the braid is soldered, let the PL-259 cool down and check for shorts (Between the braid and the center conductor). Then, solder the center conductor again, wait for it to cool and check again for a shorts. 

Checking

If the PL-259 is outdoors, put on some self-amalgamating tape and some Scotch Super 33+ as it has a great temperature range to it. 

 

AmateurLogic.TV Episode 207 is now available for download.

The sights and sounds of Field Day 2025. Mike upgrades an unsupported laptop to Windows 11.
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Ground-mounted verticals are all the rage these days in portable HF operations. This is particularly true in POTA activations. We all like to get extra mileage out of our verticals in terms of their frequency range and efficiency, no?

One method is to add an inductor to the radiating element to extend what its length looks like for RF resonance. Some versions of this are to bottom-load the vertical (Wolf River Coils does this with their Sporty Forty coil) as well as center-load it (as does Chelegance does with some of their JPC line of verticals). There are top-loaded designs, too.

An issue the portable HF operator might face if they create their own vertical antenna system is determining the value of the inductor coil. I’ll walk through this briefly to illustrate one problem that many vendors create for them in their product offerings.

Shown above is a center-loaded vertical that I’ve designed. It’s called the Eiffeltenna because of the similarity to the Eiffel Tower from the tripod legs. The details will be forthcoming once it is fully tested but the focus in this article is is that it is center-loaded as the inset photo illustrates.

What inductance value should I use? It all depends on the band, height before the coil’s insertion, and the total height of the vertical itself. Oh, and the ground and counterpoise element can play a role as well. Here, I’m using a 42″x35″ sheet of Faraday Cloth on a washed gravel driveway next to my garage. While this is far from good ground conditions, it functions very well as shown in an RF sweep below.

There are a number of calculators to help hams answer these questions. One is from 66pacific.com. I’ve placed a screenshot of the calculations for this test antenna below. The design goals are for the 40 meter band (7.0 MHz). But I also want to get 20 meters available, too. The total height of the antenna is specified as 16.75′. The coil is inserted at 7.5′ so what is the value of the required inductor to make a 20 meter vertical resonant on 40 meters here? According to this calculator, we need a coil that measures 12.1 micro-Henries.

One option is to simply build a fixed (non-adjustable) coil for this value. There are many online coil calculators for this. It is a desirable option unless there might be another band or the ground counterpoise system is very different or something else that changes things here. The other option is to purchase a coil from a number of vendors. One gotcha: very, very few actually tell the customer the inductance value for their coil (or the range if it’s an adjustable one)! They usually just say it’s “for 40M” referring to their own commercial antenna product for which it is an accessory.

Since I have several coils like this, I used one of my calibrated bench LCR meters (HP 4275a @ 200 KHz) to measure the value or range of values for several commercially available inductor coils. The results are in the table below. I have included three adjustment settings for the variable coils and the Q value. One definition of Q is “The quality factor (Q factor) is defined as the ratio of reactance to resistance, indicating efficiency at a given frequency.” For us, the importance of Q is “A higher Q value signifies lower losses and better suitability for high-frequency applications, as it implies a smaller ratio of resistance to inductive reactance.” So Q is an additional measurement about that inductor’s value that shapes how effectively it works.

While the MFJ open-air coil is no longer being manufactured, it is in wide circulation in the amateur radio community. It has a wide range, from 0.4 to 17.1 uH with corresponding Q values of 0.5 to 5.8. While the Mad Dog adjustable coil (sturdily built, I might add) has a wider range (0.73 to 28.3), it has somewhat low Q values (0.3 to 0.6). The Chelegance JPC-7 also has a wide range of inductance settings, from 0.5 to 22.8. Like the Mad Dog coil, the JPC-7 Q values are not great at 0.33 to 0.18 (double checked this figure). Here’s where one coil, larger than the rest, shines in this table. The Wolf River Coils Silver Bullet 1000 has values from 2.73 to 80.3, allowing a larger frequency range for loaded vertical antennas. Equally impressive is that the Q values range from 4.3 to 13.5 at the same time. All of these adjustable coils would fit the requirement of adding a 12.1 uH value at the center point of the vertical antenna shown above.

I included another coil from Wolf River, their fixed value Sporty Forty. They don’t tell the buyer what value it is, just that it’s an accessory for their ground-mounted whip antennas to get them to also work on 40 meters. I have two and they’re well built. Their value is 8.3 uH. There is a clone from China that is also 8.3 uH. Perhaps because of different manufacturing processes, the WRC coil has a much higher Q value at 8.6 than the clone from China has at 2.5. For these fixed value coils, it is key to realize what inductance value they have because neither would work in the center-loaded vertical example used here.

There is a very neat “bypass” trick created by Michael KB9VBR, published on his Youtube Channel. My version is shown at left. It’s simply a set of pigtails attached at the top and bottom of the coil with Power Pole connectors on each end. Plug them together, the coil is bypassed. Unplug them, and it’s in the driven element. Takes about 15 minutes or so with materials that you likely already have it you’re an antenna builder. If not, these parts are very inexpensive via online vendors.

This bypass trick can be used with any inductor coil so keep it in mind if you build a center-loaded vertical like I’ve done here. I don’t have to bring down the full vertical whip by unscrewing it, physically removing the coil, and replacing the whip. I can just reach up, plug or unplug the pigtails, and the vertical is either on 20 or 40 meters. This assumes that I’ve already done two things in the case of the Eiffeltenna center-loaded vertical.

Getting it tuned spot-on for 20 meters is fairly easy using the Faraday Cloth for the counterpoise field. It is a precursor for switching in the adjustable coil, such as the JPC-7, as shown above in my driveway. This is so that the coil can than then be adjusted to the correct uH value to load the antenna for 40 meters using an antenna analyzer. Once this is accomplished, marking the coil makes the process almost automatic during setup in the field. Checking it with an antenna analyzer, though, is always a good thing (ask me how I know, lol).

These vertical antennas can be configured in many ways but I hope that this article is useful to the portable operator who wants to operate with multiple band options using a quick setup vertical antenna. The Eiffeltenna, inspired by a tripod experiment published by Jim W6LG on his popular Youtube Channel, and further work by Jason VE5REV, fits that bill. Extend the tripod, add the coil and whip, placed it on the Faraday Cloth rectangle, connect the ground wire to the Cloth and the coax, and you are largely ready to go.

I’ll be publishing more about this very portable antenna once I’ve completed testing it. However, getting a load of the principles in this article applies to many, many vertical antennas. Get a the load of the coil you’re buying before the purchase!

The Summits On The Air (SOTA) program offers a good set of tools for chasing and activating summits. Outside of the SOTA program, many different outdoor and hiking apps are also useful for planning and doing activations.

The tools I use have changed over time, so here’s an inventory of what I am currently using. This is not an exhaustive list, but my own personal, commonly-used list of tools. Recall that I typically chase and activate summits only on frequencies above 50 MHz, which affects how I use these apps.

Chasing

SOTAwatch is the main website for setting and monitoring Alerts and Spots, always useful.

The GoTo SOTA app on my iPhone is SOTA Goat, which can set and display alerts, spots, and other information. This app is very handy and useable.

I recently wrote about HamAlert, which I normally have set to let me know of any SOTA spot in the state of Colorado (W0C Association). I am looking for summits that I can work on VHF, so I monitor for only in-state activations.

Planning

For planning, the SOTA Atlas (Sotl.as) is an excellent mapping website. It offers some good filtering tools to view such things as unactivated summits, frequently-activated summits, summits that you have not activated this year, etc.

SOTA Atlas does more than just mapping. It includes pages that show other SOTA information.

Of course, the repository for all things SOTA is the SOTA Database. One handy feature for planning purposes is the Resources section associated with each summit. Here, your fellow SOTA enthusiasts may provide links or tips concerning activating a particular summit.

For more detailed mapping around a particular summit, I use GaiaGPS. I pay for the premium service that provides access to a wide variety of maps, which can be essential for finding the best access and approach to a summit. I use their iOS app, which I load with waypoints for summits in areas that I expect to activate.

Lately, I’ve been using AllTrails to gather route information for a particular hike or summit. There are many hiking apps out there, and you probably have your favorite.

Alerting & Spotting

To set an Alert or Spot, I use either SOTAwatch or SOTA Goat, already mentioned above. An Alert provides advance notice of an activation, while a Spot indicates that an activator is on the summit and on the air.

I have also found it helpful to maintain an email list of potential VHF chasers in my area, and I will drop them a quick email indicating that I’ll be on a summit at a particular time and frequency.  These folks may or may not pay attention to SOTAwatch, so pinging them via email lets them know a local activation is coming.

One app and website that I only use occasionally is SOTAmat (“SOTA Mate”). This is a very clever app that supports SOTA (and POTA) spotting when normal internet connectivity is not available. I have not used this app very often, but when I did, it was super helpful.

Logging

My hiking partner Joyce/K0JJW and I usually log on paper during an activation. When we get home, I transfer the paper log into an electronic format using the G0LGS SOTA Editor. This is the best, simple SOTA logging program I have found. Sorry, it only runs on Windows. It stores the log in CSV format, but it can also export the info into ADIF.

Sometimes I need to edit and manipulate the log file, especially when I do a combined SOTA + POTA activation. ADIF Master is an excellent tool for editing ADIF files. (Sorry, Windows only.)

Summary

This is an overview of the main tools I use for SOTA. It is quite awesome that we have these apps and websites available for free or at a very low cost.

What tools are you using for SOTA?

73 Bob K0NR

The post My Favorite SOTA Tools appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Map of IARU contacts

This weekend, I took part in the IARU contest and entered the CW category. The solar conditions made the contest a challenge with G1 and G2 conditions along with a bouncing ball Bz. This made QSB an issue, along with very few DX contacts in the log. I pulled the plug for a while on Saturday, when on 20m, my signal was almost being treated as  ground wave from the propagation gods. I did get on early Sunday morning Conditions on 40m were not too bad. I stayed with it until the end of the contest, which was 9 am local time on Sunday. On Sunday, I was able to make it to ZW5B and ZL6HQ on 40m, who both were booming in. 

Final score

Overall The conditions made this contest a part-time effort, as I am not going to sit in the chair and endlessly call CQ contest. I hope that soon the Genvyshev gap (if that is what we are having) comes to an end soon. I am missing the great conditions we were having. What is the Genvyshev, you ask? Well, it is explained very well by fellow blogger Bas PE4BAS here