This started as more of an IF (interactive fiction — not intermediate frequency) blog, but it does make a lot of sense to consolidate other topics here as well, since most of the time when I have to list a “blog” or “web site” link, I list this one. So, consider the flood gates opened. That probably means a flurry of excited posts followed by intermittent (on a geological time scale) dry spells. Let’s face it: that’s just how I am about updating websites. Maybe postings will be more regular if I can broaden the scope of the posts to just about everything and if the blog posts are useful to me as a sort of lab notebook.
Along these lines, one topic I’d like to document is ham radio trips, which I will conveniently define as any time I am not at home and get to play radio. Since I take a lot of trips for work, and since I almost always take a radio along, there should be a bunch of these. Very often, the conditions aren’t optimal, and I don’t have a lot of time on trips, so more often that not, I probably won’t make that many contacts, but it’s more the effort than the QSO count.
Rather than recount projects and outings to date, I’ll just start from here forward. This weekend, I spent a couple days in Boca Raton. Scratch that. That’s how it is listed on the map — it is actually Deerfield Beach, Florida. It’s only a beach if you consider concrete to be beach-like. It’s inland a few miles, and the view was of route 95. The conference I was attending was held at a resort that actually *is* in Boca Raton and overlooks the the ocean, but I’m travelling at government rate, and that only goes so far.
My room was on the third floor of the hotel, right near the front entrance, which made antenna placement challenging. On the first evening, I bid my time until there were no cabs or cars in the oval driveway, and then lobbed a 65′ long wire over a palm tree. I had attached it to a water bottle, and couldn’t see where it landed after I gave it a toss. There were a couple tense moments when I went looking for it outside and found it dangling 20′ above the driveway, over the heads of some oblivious guests. I managed to yank it back a bit and get it into the bushes. Later that night, after dark, I guyed it down more substantially. Most of the antennas was elevated at about 35′, with the distant end down lower. I ran a 35′ counterpoise around the room and tuned the whole thing with a Hendricks SLT+ tuner.
The rig du jour was the 40m Rockmite, with the 7028.0/7028.9 crystal, running from a 7.2 Ah absorbed glass fiber lead acid battery. A picokeyer was built into the rockmite, and morse code was generated by a Palm Paddle which was duct taped to the battery. Where the wire crossed the metal window frame, I wrapped some duct tape around the wire as padding and then closed the window snuggly. Luckily, the hotel cleaning crew didn’t mind wires sticking out the window, and left the whole thing intact while I was attending my meeting on Saturday.
So far, I have had two — count them, two — contacts on the rockmite, but considering that it only puts out 300mW, that’s not too bad. Both have been from home using my 43′ vertical antenna (which is nothing more than a vertical wire radiator slung into a tree plus a few ground radials). One contact was across town, the other was to Michigan. In the Michigan case, I was responding to a CQ call, and it was a difficult QSO.
I had no problem hearing other stations calling on 7.028 plus or minus 1 khz. Powerful stations would cut across both of my frequencies, and I had to wait them out. I heard strong signals from Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, Germany, Croatia, France, and around sunset, from Columbia. Some strong local signals (SC, GA) were zero beat, but I could not work them. I called for a few hours intermittently, but had no responses. Well, maybe some qrz’s, but I am not sure to whom they were replying.
This was the first I had tried out the SLT tuner with the rockmite. Interestingly, the rockmite is powerful enough to illuminate the LED that tells you when the system is resonant. I would have wondered if my signal were getting out at all, if I had not had some confirmation from the reverse beacon network. Apparently, I was just above noise for a few of the stations, but at times, my signal was pretty decent (also, though, taking into considerations that the receiving systems for some of these reporting stations have high gain antennas).
So, no bites, not even nibbles, but considering that the antenna was somewhat of a compromise, I’m not writing off the rockmite. I am, however, strongly considering finishing the Texas Topper amplifier, which would boost the signal nearer to 5W and give me a fighting chance when my antenna options are limited.