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.
Not a lot going on this week due to frequent thunderstorms and getting married. Yes, you read that correctly. We’ve gotten lots of thunderstorms lately. Little radio fun as a result.
I did try to work some CW into a few evenings this week as best I could. I didn’t manage a lot of contacts, but added some more POTA activators to my hunter log, which has now earned me the Silver Hunter award for making contacts to 20 unique parks. Not all of these have been CW contacts, but that should be quick to come since I’m not working any other mode these days. HF digital doesn’t even interest me much currently. I’m sure I’ll bring it back into the fold sooner or later, but I’m doing this CW thing that just has me completely engulfed and I’m loving it!
Turning my attention back toward antennas, I bought a pair of cheap BNC dual binding posts to use with my QRP radios. I need to cut a length of wire to use as the radiator wire and then use a few other wires for a ground plane. This would be a super compact antenna to keep in my QMX kit bag. As long as I had the wire tuned to give me a good SWR on the bands that radio can operate on, I wouldn’t have to worry about needing to tune anything. I’ll need to research whether that will be possible though as I’m not too knowledgeable about plain ol’ wires being used as antennas. I’ve only ever used antennas that required some sort of matching unit included somewhere. I assume it can be a viable antenna option for the QMX, but it warrants some testing to be sure. If you have used such an antenna with your QMX or any of the QRP Labs’ transceivers successfully, please leave a comment and tell me about it. I’d love to hear about how that went for you.
The North American QSO Party – CW is coming up this coming weekend. The Vienna Wireless Society is planning a club POTA activation on Saturday at a Bull Run Regional Park which is part of the Virginia Bird & Wildlife Trail, POTA park US-9935. Afterward, they plan to work a bit of the QSO party as time permits. I haven’t heard a lot of details about the outing. I plan to take my KX3 and QMX and maybe the Buddipole for quicker antenna deployment. The Buddipole seemed to present a wide enough bandwidth on 20 meters when I set it up last week to make sure it worked. It should make for a good enough antenna for use during a club event. I’m sure I’ll have something to say about that event in the next issue of Expired Ham.
Speaking of that QMX of mine, I finally made my first CW QSO with that radio this weekend. I tossed up the NØAPX EFHW out on the deck knowing that it offers a low SWR across the entire 20 meter band and connected it to the QMX. I plugged in my paddles and headphones and started hunting. I was able to contact Ken, AKØA in Kansas again as he activated US-2334. I was impressed with the capability of the QMX to get out halfway across the country with its QRPness. I have a newfound appreciation for the radio and will have to find more opportunities to put it to use. With the KX3, I grabbed several POTA activators and one in particular was really unique to me. Jerry, AC4BT, is pretty cool on three accounts–he’s a part-time local CW operator (he splits time between the DC metropolitan area and New York–must be nice, right?), he’s a CWops Member, and as a result of that, his call was used as part of my CWops Academy Fundamental class coursework when we were practicing QSO message formats. Jerry was working a 2-fer in Maryland on 20 meters and I was able to get myself into his log. Which was interesting since he was only 10 miles or so away as the crow flies. Ground wave radiation I guess.
Here’s hoping for some fairer weather ahead. This past week has just been a bummer in terms of thunderstorm activity here. Anything that limits my already limited amount of time I can devote to playing radio is highly undesirable. I would not mind hitting up a park mid-week after a workday this week. We’ll see if I can make that happen.
Until then, 73 ES CUL.
Matthew, K2MAS
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