That last month went by in much less time than the six or eight weeks it took February to get out of here.
Anyway April had, among other things, World Amateur Radio Day and the Ontario and Quebec QSO parties. Before (and after) that busy weekend at RAC, we went to work on the end fed antenna. By went to work, I mean we ditched the idea of using an end fed half wave over what is essentially a steel roof. There is nothing wrong with the idea of an end fed half wave, and in particular the one we have from MyAntennas.com. It’s a great system, just the wrong place for it. So…
We took the transformer down and ran the same wire, about 40m long, in the same place and worked it against the same very good ground that was our problem in the first place. The result: a quarter wave inverted L for 160m, a capability we never thought we would have at RAC HQ. At the same time, on the same coax, we ran a wire up and back down again, a bit separated from the fiberglass pole, and tuned it up on 80. Another single wire straight up the mast, and we had 40m. A quarter wave on 20 is only about 5 metres long, so for fun, we ran another wire from the feedpoint out on an angle to a guy wire. Murphy was around, (ask me off line) but got bored and left after a while. It not only tuned up on 160, 80, 40 and 20m, but for reasons we don’t understand also gave us 30 and 60 metres as a bonus. You have probably heard of a fan dipole. Think of this as half of a fan dipole worked against ground. The patterns for each band will be ugly, I’m sure, but it lets us get out on the lower bands. As the solar cycle moves on, they will once again become prime ham band real estate.
We had been having trouble getting the Flex to play nice on CW. Mike VA3MW came up and gave us a tutorial on the rig, and we thought we had the problem licked. Not so much, it turned out. This week we pulled out the oscilloscope and set about figuring out what’s going on. We found out it takes at least 0.2 seconds to turn this cruise ship of a rig around from transmit to receive, a little long in contests, but we can work with that. By messing around with various other timing settings we were finally able to get it to transmit the first dit every time, even at 35 wpm. Since none of us there at the time could run any faster, I think we had the problem solved. No more “UE?NSQ?” coming back to us from afar.
Coming up is the Canadian Prairies QSO Party on May 9, and I’m looking at the ARRL June VHF and of course FIELD DAY. I won’t be at RAC HQ that weekend, but am considering offering the use of the station to someone or sometwo who would like to try a 1E entry from HQ.
Back at the homeshack, there are 28 QSOs in the VE3FFK log that aren’t net or contest contacts. Better than last year, but I’d better get going before baseball and bicycling start to vie for my time.
Here’s hoping for more POTA weather for all of you.
73
mk
Last Updated on 2026-05-04 by Eve