Georgia QSO Party - April 14-15, 2012
Appalachian Trail Division - N4TRB
I had several objectives for participating in the QSO party and none of them involved trying to score a lot of points! Instead, I was interested in field-testing some new equipment and techniques. First, my Yaesu FT-817ND is still pretty new and I certainly haven't learned all of its capabilities.
Murphy did visit me on my Saturday outing. I believe the bumpy Forest Service roads caused my MFJ antenna analyzer to fail. It worked the last time I used it at home and was reading infinite SWR by the time I tried to use it in Cooper's Gap on the Appalachian Trail. It turns out that the center pin of the SO-239 connector is linked to the circuit board with a flimsy piece of 22 AWG sold conductor about 1/8-inch in length. It had broken. This was quickly repaired on Saturday night with a much heftier piece of stranded wire. Saturday's loss of the analyzer meant that I couldn't do any really good analysis of the Hamstick/extender combination over my portable ground. To get in some operating I simply set the 20m whip element to the recommended length and went with that. Finally, I drove a lot of Forest Service roads that I haven't visited in nearly 20 years! I was looking for possible operating locations for future events; and I found a couple. There's a nice fire tower within a clearing that's a pretty easy hike; and then, of course, there's the top of Tray Mountain which is drivable. One of my hair-brained ideas is to find a nice-size chunk of real estate to put up a decent but temporary 160m antenna of some sort for the December 160m contest. A clearing atop a small peak might just fit the bill. So that's the tale of my adventure. 73, |
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This page last updated 04/20/2012