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.
I had another fun week this week in regard to amateur radio. I finally activated US-1596 Seneca Creek State Park near Gaithersburg, Maryland via CW. That was a lot of fun and only took me three tries to be successful. I am so glad I decided to take the CWops Academy course this past Spring to help get me skilled enough to make solid CW contacts on the air. The ice breaker came during this year’s ARRL Field Day event that I attended as part of my amateur radio club, Vienna Wireless Society. It was during Field Day that, in the last hours of the event, I pushed aside all the butterflies and nerves and made a sloppy CW contact with W3GH who probably realized I was a newb. However, once the ice was broken, the CW waters flowed freely thereafter. I haven’t made tons of CW contacts since then, but I have not worked any other mode except CW ever since that day and I’ve found myself yearning to get out and play on the radio more and more now that I have a more enjoyable operating mode at my fingertips. On top of that, I have a new-to-me radio and antenna system that allows me to operate CW from home much more easily that I was able to do before.
I mentioned last week that I had been doing price comparisons between the Buddipole and the Chelegance JP-7. Sure enough, soon thereafter as if by a stroke of fate, I saw another ham’s ad for a Buddipole antenna they were selling on QRZ.com’s swap meet, purchased it at a mighty fine price, and it arrived earlier this week. I think it might be too large to deploy at my QTH for the most part, but it breaks down small enough that it should prove to be a worthwhile purchase for portable operations. I did deploy it today to play around with it and make sure there wasn’t anything that I needed to replace. It works as expected, though I do not have enough room to rotate it without either hitting the side of the house or getting a whip stuck in some tree limbs. This turned out to be the Buddipole Deluxe package, albeit an older generation version with the unfinished stainless whips and integrated choke balun on one end of the provided feed line. No worries or complaints here, though. The components are all present and accounted for and in decent enough shape. I may end up buying the 16ft mast for it or if I plan on setting up a portable ops station for a contest like one of the Field Days or something similar, then maybe I’ll invest in a taller mast solution like the 10m one from Mastwerks.
Last week, during the K1USN SST on Sunday evening, I made contact with the K1USN club station. Apparently, you may request a certificate, or QSL document, from them to show that you made a successful contact with them during the slow-speed contest. I sent them the information about the contact, but it’s been a week and I’ve not heard jack diddly from them. I’m not sure what I would have done with said certificate since I’m not one to hang things on my walls and I don’t have a “shack” to speak of, so I don’t suppose I’ll get myself worked up over it. If they send me a certificate, great. If not, that’s OK too.
Other happenings this week included making some purchases for kit components from some ham owned and operated small businesses such as the Radio Prep Etsy store. Dave sells handmade QRP 49:1 transformers in both built and kit forms. I bought one of the prebuilt ones and it is really quite cool. I have not yet been able to deploy it though I have all the tools I need to get that done. I plan on using this with a tuned strand of wire for the QRP Labs QMX. Dave recommends no more than 8 to 10 Watts through his transformer, so this places this piece of antenna kit in a good place for the QMX’s needs and I should never have to worry about sending too much power and damaging the transformer nor having to remember that I need to lower the power output of the radio that I’m using. You can get one of these from Dave’s Etsy store at the link above or click this link.
Also check out Brian, KF8ASE and his Ham Radio Supply store on Etsy. Brian makes some amazingly high quality inline chokes with quality components from Messi & Paoloni. I recently purchased two chokes from him; the POTA choke with PL-259/SO-239 connectors and also the QRP choke which is terminated with BNC connectors. Highly recommended! These two chokes take up very little room in my kit bags and boxes and none of my feed lines have chokes built in (except for the one that comes with the Buddipole) so having a choke that can easily be attached when needed is great. If you don’t want to build your own, let Brian build you one.
I’m trying to get myself prepped for the CWops Academy Intermediate course that begins in September. Looking through the course curriculum, there is a focus on contesting and rag chewing with head copy and sending skills beginning at 10 WPM and progressing to sending/copying comfortably at 20 WPM by the end of the course. I’m part of the way there now, except for the “comfortably” part, especially if it is in relation to rag chewing. Callsigns at 20-25 WPM? I can do that successfully if I’m able to ask for repeats from time to time. Copying names or sentences at 20-25 WPM? Not happening easily at this time. I have a few weeks to work on improving those skills. I’ll get there. I have my sights set on CWOps club membership.
That’s all I’ve got for you this week.
Vy 73 de K2MAS
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