AmateurRadio.com

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. 

I posted yesterday I had contacted F8EI and in the heat of the moment I had thought I contacted  him with between 20 and 14mW's of power!! I was thrilled when the contact ended and my calculations done it showed the distance at (I used the higher wattage of 20mWs) 181,958 miles per watt. I was thrilled and it was off to another contact to see what I could do for more miles per watt. On my Hendricks attenuator there is a bypass switch and I use it as the audio also is attenuated. I found another contact and switched in the Hendricks attenuator as I was transmitting I noticed the power output was around 150Mw's!!!! Did I read the meter wrong in my excitement.....I already sent an email to F9EI with the news of a 20mW contact. I was very discouraged not knowing what I was reading during the contact. Well 140mW's in nothing to laugh at and the miles per watt is still impressive.
Today I was looking through some recent photos on my PC of my shack setup as I wanted to change the wall paper on my PC at work. I was looking at pic's from yesterdays contact being the most recent pics of my shack. In one of the pic's was a shot of the rig and Hendricks attenuator, as I zoomed in on the attenuator the slider switches used to attenuate were not in the same position as they are right now! I had never repositioned the switches so I got to thinking Hmmmmm when I hit the bypass switch did I move the one attenuate switch that is out of position according the the picture?????. I turned on the K3 and moved the switch back to the position in the picture and took a reading on the meter and it was bouncing between 20 and 14mWs of power as the key sent out dits and dah's.
HOLY COW I did contact F9EI with (lets use the higher output) with 20mW's and I was not reading the meter wrong after all. It was me who inadvertently moved an attenuate switch to off along with the bypass switch. Just to test I checked the output with this attenuate switch in the off position (opposite of the pic I took just after the contact) and low and behold I was getting around 150mW's. Bottom line I really did make a 181,958 miles per watt contact!!!!

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. 

In 2012 according to my log all my contacts were CW and QRP or QRPp type contacts. This is the 3rd year that I have made just CW contacts. The reason being SSB in the past would bother my neighbours and since this is a stealth operation SSB is OUT. As for the digital modes I just have a very low frustration factor not a good combination for setting up digital modes. Maybe 2013 will have me mellow a bit to try the digital modes again.

2012	100	500	CW: 100.00% Phone: 0.00% Data: 0.00%
2011	49	258	CW: 100.00% Phone: 0.00% Data: 0.00%
2010	25	170	CW: 100.00% Phone: 0.00% Data: 0.00%
2009	10	192	CW: 19.27% Phone: 0.00% Data: 80.73%
2008	45	495	CW: 36.57% Phone: 0.00% Data: 63.43%

Club log was great in helping me get a snap shot of my log for 2012. According to Club log I was able to hit 125 QRP DXCC contacts for the year! Unfortunately I was not able to qualify for the ARRL DXCC Jubilee award as they were not counting all the DXCC entities. I was able to accumulate 83 DXCC's toward that award but this award only ran for the year of 2012 so I came up short.
My contacts for the year were 500, I thought it was a lot more but there were times I would forget to log contacts. BUT I almost doubled my contact total from the year before of 258. Seems I have to get away from the soldering iron and on the rig more!!
I was able to make it into 23 CQ zones
Some of my highlight contacts were Gibraltar, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Jordan and ST. Pierre & Miquelo.
Finally I was able to better my 1,000 miles per watt distance to 45,869 miles per watt with a QRPp contact to HA8JV with 100mWs of power.

This weekend it was my intention to get some DXCC's into the books and the weekend is not over yet and there is still time....but.....the bands were alive with the Worked all Germany contest. On Saturday morning and mid morning 10m was alive with DL calls. I have been reading over the past few weeks how great 10m  WSPRing has been. I wanted to give QRPp operations a shot and 10m seemed wide open to Europe. Below are the result from my Saturday and Sunday morning QRPp contacts.
1. HA3FTA ( I know it's Hungary not Germany) 200mWs          22,776 miles per watt.
2. DK9PY                                                          100mWs           39,565 mpw.
3. DJ1MM                                                          500mWs            8,405 mpw.
It was now time to start dropping the power lower.
4. DL2DX                                                              50mWs         82,857  mpw
Below was the best distance of the day for Saturday the conditions started to change on 10m and contacts were getting harder and harder to make. Besides it was time to get some things done around the house. 
5. DL1NUX                                                           40mws        101,702   mpw.

KX3 serial number 1990

The KX3 is all together now and there was some bumps in the road and I will share them in a later post. I still have to calibrate the roofing filter I will be using my Elecraft XG2 to do this but this may have to wait for another day. I have been hidden away in my radio room for a day and a half. The build took longer as I was videoing the process. The video will be divided up into segments of the build........see how it turns out.