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 hope everyone has had a great week. I’ve tried to start a new habit of hunting POTA parks on my lunch break during the work week. I’ve been taking my Elecraft KH1 with me to work recently and as long as the weather cooperates, I’ll mosey on over to a local municipal park near the office and get an antenna in the air and get to hunting. It’s been fun. I’m not getting a ton of QSOs, but it at least keeps me on the air and helps me grow that POTA hunter’s log little by little.
In other news, one of the sections of my Explorer POTA 33 mast splintered as I was taking the mast down late this week. This is unfortunate because it’s been the primary means of deploying an antenna here at the house. Luckily, Gigaparts sells the replacement sections for the Explorer POTA 20 and POTA 33 (not the HD version, though) on their site. Search for part number ZXP-POTAMAST-PARTS and make sure to read the product description so you get the correct section that you need. I ordered a replacement, so I should be back in business before long.
Related to antennas, I finally cut a length of wire for the W5CWT / RadioPrep EFHW QRP transformer. I wanted a wire antenna that was small enough to stuff in with the rest of the KH1 kit and this little 49:1 transformer is perfect for that. I cut a length of 28 AWG wire for this use case and it winds up so small it takes up barely any additional space in my KH1 go box (see below). I had it in and on the air during on my POTA hunting sessions earlier this week. I’m very pleased with the results. So much so that I ordered another one and also ordered W5CWT’s 80W-capable version so that I could use it with my higher power radios.
I swapped out my NØAPX EHFW antenna at my QTH for the HF Kits 49:1 transformer that I built months ago. I then purchased a window passthrough cable so that I could run my feed line into the house to my Yaesu FT-710. I worked several stations in last weekend’s K1USN SST and hunted a few POTA stations as well. Once I get my mast section replaced, I’ll be able to operate from home again through that. I have a very peculiar problem of setting off my smoke detectors in the house if I transmit with more than 20 watts though. It also happens when transmitting on 40 meters with anything above 5 watts. Since I can’t choke my neighbors’ mains wiring, I’ve decided 20 watts is the max power limit for use here at home and I’ll just stay off of 40 meters all together.
This weekend brought us some fair weather so I got out and played some POTA for a bit. On Saturday, I activated US-5510, Conway Robinson Memorial State Forest. It was an embarrassing activation. I don’t know what had gotten into me, but I had the most difficult time ever sending the “POTA exchange” accurately. I don’t know if it was anxiety, distractions (there was a man and his son who came and just stood nearby for 15 minutes before leaving; at one point there were six or seven police cruisers speeding up to the parking lot, I have no idea why; I have some things on my mind recently that’ve been bothering me), or just a really “off” day, but I could barely send a person’s call back to them to give them my information and to say thank you. I was a LID through and through. Not my finest hour, to say the least.
I wanted to put my Buddipole up on its new 18-foot mast, but it was a bit too breezy when I got to the park and so I opted for the shorter 9-foot mast. I’m either going to have to break down and buy Buddipole’s guying kit for this mast, fashion something of my own, or buy some dumbbells to put on the legs. The breeze subsided by the time I was wrapping up things. I would have maybe played around a bit more with the taller mast had it not been for the ARRL Sweepstakes starting soon thereafter. I wouldn’t have had any room to work POTA, so I called it a day, packed up, and headed home. I never did find out why all the police activity occurred. They were all gone before I packed up.
Not much else going on around these parts. I wish you all a fantastic upcoming week. Enjoy your time playing with your radio and I’ll chat with you again next week.
Dit dit,
Matthew K2MAS
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