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The next step in my Alexloop tests is the bandwidth in which the loop has. Again the antenna is mounted in a bedroom/office on the second floor of the house so that may have some affect on the SWR. I do plan on getting the loop in the out doors were the ceiling, walls and surrounding furniture do not have an affect on the loop. Below is the bandwidth results.
28.004 (SWR at 2.2) to 28.060 (SWR at 2.1) around 60 Khz of bandwidth.
21.020 (SWR at 2.0) to 21.070 (SWR at 1.7) around 50Khz of bandwidth
14.000 (SWR at 2.1) to 14.035 (SWR at 1.9) around 35Khz of bandwidth
10.110 (SWR at 1.8) to 10.125 (SWR at 1.9) around 15Khz of bandwidth
  7.005 (SWR at 2.5) to 7.015 (SWR at 2.6) around 10Khz of bandwidth
 I did however use the ATU on the KX3 and the SWR was flat when used on all bands so if I want I can use the tuner and increase the bandwidth of the antenna. I do know that my attic dipole on 10Mhz the SWR is about 9.1 to 1 and the tuner will flatten that out and I have made lots of milli watt contacts all over the world. So the next step is to get this antenna out doors and give it a whirl out there and see how it does.

Things don't seem to work  when you really need them

I have been reading on many blogs of fellow hams who have had an increase in QRN due to many electrical sources and routers just to mention a few. The enjoyment of ham radio has been for many cut short due to devices blowing a hole in the spectrum!! Yes the companies are suppose to adhere to regulations regarding emissions. BUT both the adhering and the enforcement are very much lacking. We as hams are left to somehow deal with the hash that many modern items produce. I have this feeling it is not going to decrease as time goes on but increase. I have found this is were in my case the MFJ 1026 shines for me. I have a Plasma TV on the main floor and when Julie is cooking, surfing the net or relaxing the TV is on with some music playing in the background. I could go down and ask her to turn the TV off....but....I am a married man not a foolish man. Below is a YouTube video I did today showing how effective the MFJ 1026 is. It was done with my Iphone so some movement will be noticed. (note to self....get a proper recording device)

Signals on 10m this afternoon

Sunday afternoon has seemed to pass just a little faster with setting our clocks ahead last evening an hour. I did find some time to get on the radio (finally after about 5 days off). I tried 10m and according to the P3 screen things were fairly calm for that band. As I was starting up my PC along with the DXlab software I did notice some small and large spikes on the P3. Most of the time when the band is this dead and it was about 2 in the afternoon as well these spikes are just QRM.

EA2LU antennas

Upon investigation to my surprise the first spike was a signal from PV8ADI in Brazil. For some reason I have had troubles with South American station. Not sure if it's the position of the dipole in the attic or just one of those always hard to get spots for me. I gave the station a go with 500mW's but as I expected....nothing. He was having lots of stations (ones I could not hear) come back to him. The flavor of the contact was signal report and move on. I brought the K3 up to 5 watts and gave him a another call. He came back to me and we exchanged reports and moved on.

I was now noticing some stronger signals, the first I tuned in was EA2LU from Spain. I tried Jorge with 500mW's and made the contact without any troubles. He was running a  Yagi at 100 watts. This was a nice contact as we were able to exchange rig info, antenna info and

EA2LU setup

 chat about how well he found my attic dipole preforming along with only 500mW's. I then moved on to another strong signal that had just shown up while my QSO what Jorge was ending. This station was EA1ND calling CQ and again I was able to make the contact with only 500mW's as well. Nacho had told me this was his first contact into Canada and he was very thankful that I came back to him. For sure I will upload to LoTW and Eqsl.  We spoke for a short time about the weather both here and there along with  RST, power and name. These Spanish contacts at 500mW's netted me 7600 miles per watt. Just made contact with FG5FR from Guadeloupe with 500mW's on 15m.  I have been keeping one ear on the rig (headphones) and writing the blog post.....multi tasking who would had thunk.

Back in December when my second Elecraft K2 kit arrived I tossed around the idea of starting an additional blog about my K2 build. I planned to not only document my kit build but to keep the site updated with links and sites that will help out fellow builders. I have up to this point produced 3 pages and some updating posts on the blog itself. Check out the blog and give me  your feedback as well as any info you would like to see on the site as well.

Julie was out and about snapping shots!!

For me the ARRL  DX CW contest is over, I have some blog, email and cleaning to do for the rest of the day. Over all the contest was a success for me not that I broke any records with regards to points or number of contacts. I was very pleased with how the station and antenna were working, I find that contests are a great way to see how the rig and antenna preform. With regards to the rig and software I merged N1MM logger and N4PY rig control software through LP-bridge and as an added bonus I was able to also use the Flexradio's flex control vfo knob.....now that was a mouthful!! Lets break this down shall we N1MM is the

At 40mW and below this is the reading

contest logger that I use, N4PY is the software I use to control my K3. LP-bridge is a virtual port program that allows these two programs to somewhat talk to each other. I say somewhat as there are some minor issues. (there is another virtual port program VSP manager that allows perfect integration but I did not want to install it just before a contest) Oh and the FlexRadio FlexControl works fantastic with N4PY's rig control program and through LP-Bridge also works with N1MM as well. Another software program I ended
up purchasing was MRP40 cw decoding program. Now my code is not to bad at all but during contests I have found that for some reason some stations send at the speed of sound. (not sure why as they may loose more contacts that gain as folks just move on being not able to understand the fast code) For those stations this is were MRP40 shines.

Programs running during the contest

This is as far as I am concerned one of the best decoding programs. For those who want to participate in a CW contest but your code is not up to par this program will get you in on the action.  It's not free but is well worth the money!!

That was the software success for the contest other great events were being able to keep my power down to 1 watt....except for 2 contacts were the power creeped up to 3 watts. Did I say the power was kept to 1 watt? That was for a total number of  6 contacts the rest of the DX contacts went into the log with power numbers varying from 10mW's to 900mW's!!
Here is how the power numbers broke down
Contacts          Power
2                      10mW
13                     20mW
2                       40mW
4                       50mW
14                     100mW
22                     500mW
12                     From above 500 to 900mW
6                       1 watt
2                        3 watts

77                      TOTAL
I did say there was some records broken here at VE3WDM and they are
1. 69 DX contacts with under 1 watt in a contest!
2. Miles per watt bar is set higher.....CR3A with 10mW is 344,468 miles per watt 
                                                       DL6FBL with 10mW is 400,126 miles per watt

10mW on the QRPometer

I was not concerned about QSO per hour rate as at these power levels most of the time I had to try more than several times to make a contact. My radio equipment was (for those of  you wondering) the Elecraft K3, Elecraft P3, QRPometer, LP-100 meter, Hendricks 41dB attenuator and the last but not least the monster antenna......an attic dipole the Alpha Delta DX-EE.......that's right an attic dipole!!

Working the KX3

OQ5A setup

On Friday I was able to take the opportunity to get some well deserved radio time in. Most weeknights when I get in from work and get the "house stuff" done I find I'm just to tired for the rig. On Friday I was able to fire up the KX3 and try my hand at some QRPp operationing. I was scanning up and down 20m's and found OQ5A from Belgium calling CQ. I adjusted the KX3 to 100mW's of power and gave OQ5A a go, he came back to me and with just a few repeats all the contact info was passed along and the QSO is in the books. This contact  at 100mW's netted me a distance of  37,603 miles per watt. 
I emailed Greet to let him in on some of the station info at this end. He was surprised I was only using 100mW's of power into an attic dipole to boot. Now here is the funny thing about propagation with 100mW's I tried to contact K0DNG in Kansas City Missouri and it was a huge struggle. I was going to up the power but Dennis was sending his 73s to me and moving on to calling CQ again.


Finally I saw on my Maclogger's cluster a spot for W0RW/PM now the cluster showed this to be in Indonesia. He was very weak and kinda in and out and there were other station trying to contact him as well. I topped up the KX3 to the 5 watt level and gave him a go. He came back to me and gave me a respectable report.  Now I thought there was something fishy about this cluster spot showing it as an Indonesian contact. I tripped off to QRZ.com and found out that PM stood for (in this case) pedestrian mobile!!  Paul was in Colorado which is a not even close to Indonesia...(this is my high school geography shinning through) but it was great making contact as I have read on many blogs about Paul and his pedestrian mobile adventures. 

Yesterday when I got home from my failed out door op's adventure with KX3 I found out what I did. It was operator error on my part. The night before I failed to understand the KX3 charging procedure fully and I was rushing to get the battery charged for the next day. I thought I had put the batteries on a 16 hour charge by misunderstanding the simple procedure I inadvertently stopped the charge cycle. So in the morning I did try my KX3 on battery power and it did  not work but I discovered in the manual that the radio power on thresh hold had to be lowered when using NiMH batteries. I did this and the KX3 came to life. Little did I know that was all the life the batteries had in

It's charging!!

them most likely a very small factory charge.....Yesterday when I got home I looked over the instructions this time more slowly. As I went through each step at the end a time count down appeared along with "BAT CHG". I never saw this the night before! This meant is was WORKING and charging. New next few day here the temps are
going to rise into the +12C or more so I may take my KX3 into work and maybe get on 40m in the morning before I start work.
Today was a snow day for me here at VE3WDM we had a large and non forecast snow fall last night. I have over an hours drive to work on a good day and when I went out to the car at my normal 4 a.m ( not a spelling error yes 4.am) funny I call it the morning and others in my family call it the middle of the night.....I digress.....It was snowing like crazy and I did try to make it in but no roads were not cleared so it was to dangerous.
I got on the radio for some time today and snagged me some QRPp contacts. On 15m this morning I  heard Rudy IK4VFD calling CQ. He was in and out at times but I gave him a go with 500mW's of  K3 power and I got through to him!! He gave me a 539 report and did not seem to have any trouble getting through our exchange of QTH, Name, RST and a few pleasantries. I sent Rudy an email with more info about my station and the power that I was running as at the time I told him it was QRP. He got back to me with an email thanking me for our QSO. So that contact was 8467 miles per watt!!

I then found F9IE calling CQ from France and it sounded like he was just outside my window. So it was time to switch in the Hendricks attenuator and drop my power down to 150mW's. It took a few calls but Bernard was able to give me a report of 449 along with EU-064 as he is on Noirmoutier Island to boot!! So that contact gave me 24,261 miles per watt of a contact.