Another week of amateur radio has expired. Expired Ham, get it? 🙂
Welcome to another issue of Expired Ham, a weekly newsletter where I discuss the ways I participated in the amateur radio hobby this week.
My portable antenna farm is growing. My newest addition is the Silver Bullet Platinum Take-It-Along by Wolf River Coils. I purchased the platinum version because I won’t have to have to buy another one later when/if I decide to ever use an amplifier. Also, the platinum coil is rated for higher Watts on digital and I want my FT8 signals to make it to Asia and Oceania so I can cross Worked All Continents for digital modes off my to-do list.
I’ve also been practicing my soldering skills which came in handy as I finally got around to building my end-fed half-wave antenna that I purchased from ARRL’s online store several months ago. The kit comes from HF Kits and is actually pretty simple to put together. The whole process took a few hours, but only because I messed up on the toroid windings at first and soldered the wrong part and had to redo that part. Thankfully, the kit comes with more wire than you need. The antenna wire that comes with the kit seems to be good quality. I wound the wire up on a Chameleon wire winder and tagged it with these neat little cable tags.
I haven’t tested or tuned the EFHW yet, so I’m not 100% positive I built everything successfully. I’m fairly confident that I did, but we’ll see how things go when I get it up into a tree and on the air. I have another strand of wire that I, surprisingly, bought back in Spring of 2023 and never used it for anything. It’s a strand of 135 feet of “SuperWire” from Super Antennas. By my calculations, 135 feet of wire is a quarter wavelength within the 160 meter amateur radio band so, maybe I’ll make another EFHW that lets me work that band someday.
The Vienna Wireless Society, the local radio club I joined recently, has a number of weekly nets that they host. One of which is a digital mode net which I really wanted to attend this week but wasn’t able to. I need some help getting fldigi set up correctly on my MacBook. WSJT-X is all good and stuff, but I kind of want to have some actual conversations over digital modes and I’ve been struggling to figure out fldigi setup and operation for modes like PSK31, Olivia, or RTTY. I’d use JS8Call more, but the calling frequency seems to be a ghost town on the bands I’m able to hear well from my QTH. From what I understand, my club’s digital mode net is all about helping its members get their digital mode operating squared away. Hopefully, I’ll be able to attend the net this coming week.
I purchased a small dummy load to keep in my radio kit bag for those times when I need to test a radio function, but don’t want to send anything into the air. The DL30A dummy load from Diamond Antennas is rated for up to 100 Watts (peak) 15 Watts (average), is affordable, portable, and effective. I tossed it onto the end of a 3 ft length of coax and ran it across my RigExpert AA-55 Zoom analyzer and it showed an SWR of below 1.2:1 across the entire HF bands below 55 MHz.
That’s all for this week. I’m hopeful that outside temperatures start to average higher in the coming weeks so I can get outside and test these new antennas of mine. They don’t do me much good just sitting around in the house.
73 all.
K2MAS
K2MAS.net is not affiliated with any of the sites or products listed in this article. All opinions are the author’s own.
As a member of Amazon’s Associate program, I earn a small commission on qualifying purchases made through referrals. This helps offset the costs of hosting this website and are greatly appreciated.
K2MAS.net 