Ben’s Blog

Field Day went well this past weekend. It was incredibly hot, but we all made it. We made nearly 600 contacts. We had contacts with virtually every state, including Alaska, at least half of the Canadian provinces, and a few foreign countries including Cyprus. While tuning around the bands I ran up on a guy from Bath, England with an incredible signal. He must have been running an amp. Unfortunately I never got a chance to talk to him because he was more interested in chit-chatting than making Field Day contacts.

I used my “antenna launcher” to put up about seven antennas Saturday morning. I don’t think I’ve ever done a post on my launcher. I’ll have to do that soon. It’s pretty neat.

I’ve determined that I enjoy setting up the Field Day site just as much or more than actually operating. I’m not sure why that is. I’ve already got several ideas for improvements next year.

I’ve been trying to learn Morse Code (CW) for several months now. I haven’t been spending enough time on it to actually learn anything, but watching the guys at Field Day got me excited about it again. Plus, I’ve got to learn it if I want to get much use out of the radio I’m building right now. More on that soon.

I have a long mental list of things I want to do when I finally get a “real” ham radio one of these days. I recently added something I had been previously aware of, but never knew much about.

The standard mode of propagation for the VHF bands is “line-of-sight.” That is, in general, if you want to talk to someone via VHF, you need to be able to “see” them. Things like trees and buildings aren’t a problem with enough power, but you can forget going over the horizon without some sort of propagation enhancement such as “Sporadic E” or tropospheric ducting.

As meteors fly through our atmosphere and burn up, they produce ionization. As it turns out, you can bounce a VHF signal off of meteor ionization trails. These trails typically only last for a few seconds at best, but it’s long enough for stations communicating at high speeds to have a short conversation. Fortunately there are enough small meteors entering the atmosphere that there’s no need to track them or anything. You just aim a directional antenna at the guy you want to talk to and transmit and listen on a set schedule.

Some hams use voice or morse code for these sorts of communications, but a more surefire way is to use a high speed digital mode, such as FSK441, a digital mode written specifically for meteor scatter communications by Joe Taylor, K1JT, a ham and a Nobel laureate in Physics. The most popular ham band for meteor scatter communications is the 6m band, though it’s possible on several others.

Another, similar, mode I’d like to try is EME. It’s a little further down the list though, as it requires a much more impression station, both in terms of antennas and amplifiers.

As I mentioned a while back, last year I built a 2m 1/4 wave ground plane antenna to use with my handheld transceiver. I wanted a better antenna than the rubber ducky that came with my radio, and I also wanted to build an antenna. I think I posted about it on the old version of my blog, but the post didn’t get brought over.

I used plans from here. The center part is a SO-239 connector I bought at Radio Shack, and the radiating element and radials are made out of uncoated brazing rods that I procured at a farm supply store. The vertical (radiating) element is 19.3 inches long, or a quarter wavelength electrically for the 2m band (144-148 MHz). The radials are slightly longer.

It works quite well. When I tune my radio to the local National Weather Service station I get a few S units of improvement over the rubber ducky antenna. Each S-unit is 6dB, so that’s quite an improvement. Using this antenna I can get into the local repeater when I didn’t have a prayer with the rubber ducky. Of course, now I use my Diamond antenna mounted on the house.

I intended to borrow an antenna analyzer from a local ham to see how close to 50 ohms I had managed to get. I never did, but I’ll be sure to do it when I borrow the analyzer for another project. Given the way it performs, it has to be relatively close.

A few more pictures here.

Luke and I went up to the special event station last night. Our primary purpose was to help my friend from Belmont, Randy, KE5RXN, make contact with us. He had been trying all week with no luck.

When we arrived they had a nice pileup going on 20 meters. I called Randy and told him what frequency we were on. He could hear all the stations calling us, but couldn’t hear us. That most likely meant he was in our skip zone. Later, after the 20m band died, we moved to the 40m band. I called Randy again, but he still couldn’t hear us. We never got a chance to try the 80 meter band, but I expect it would have worked, as the size of the skip zone decreases with frequency. While I was there they made contact with a station on Martha’s Vineyard, and a station near Aspen, Colorado, operating with less than five watts, among others.

Today I operated the special event station during the late afternoon. When I arrived things were slow, so I switched over to 80m and Randy and I made contact without a problem. Things remained slow the remainder of my shift. My signal was getting out just fine, as the station I talked to in Manitoba, Canada, could hear me well. Maybe most everyone was still at work?

The University of Mississippi Amateur Radio Club (UMARC), of which I am a member, is having a special event station this week to commemorate the Presidential debate being held on campus Friday. The special event station runs yesterday through Friday. All contacts get a QSL card, no SASE required. You can get more information here.

I operated some this morning, and will operate again Friday afternoon from 3-5pm. This morning I made contacts with stations in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Cuba, among others, primarily on the 20m band.

Unfortunately I don’t have an HF radio yet, so I can’t make contact with them myself.