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.
Hello everyone. I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas holiday! As I mentioned, I received a new antenna for Christmas. The Yaesu/Vertex ATAS-120a and mounting components to put it onto my car. As it turned out, my Buick doesn’t have accessible seat bolts, so the LIDO mount that I got isn’t compatible with this vehicle. I will have to return that. In its stead, I’ve ordered a set of RAM mounting components that should hopefully do the trick of mounting the FT-891 control head in a suitable ergonomic location in the cabin of the car. In the interim, I’ve tested the functionality of the ATAS-120a and found it suitable, even without any proper bonding efforts, on 40-, 20- 17- 12-, 10-, and 6-meters. I could not get 15-meters tuned at all and I assume it’s because I’ve not done any of the recommended bonding of antenna system components and car body parts. At any rate, this is exciting stuff!
The ATAS-120a was simple to install along with the Diamond K400 mounting system. I managed to find a straight and flat (enough) part of the trunk lid to place the K400, installed the ATAS-120a, and made adjustments to the K400 so that the ATAS was nearly perfectly vertical. I have the K400C model, which has the shorter coax feed line because I planned on stowing the FT-891 body inside the trunk and the 6″ (or so) feed line would be just fine for that. However, since the in-car mounting solution for the control head fell through, I used an old feed line with a longer piece of coax — that I used to have in a Jeep Wrangler back in the day for a VHF/UHF radio — to connect to the FT-891 body and control head all the way up to the passenger seat so that I could test out the ATAS-120a and make some first contacts with it. I’m happy to report that set up is super simple after enabling the ATAS as the tuner option in the menus. That’s menu option 16-15, “TUNER SELECT”. Set this to ATAS. You’ll also want to set menu 05-12, “ATAS SETTING” to ENABLE to make available the Function menu that allows you to manually adjust tuning of the ATAS-120a. I recommend adding the TNR function to one of the front panel function keys. I have mine set to function key B. This lets me quickly start the ATAS tuning cycle at the press of a button instead of digging into the Function menu and selecting TNR from there. If you’re wondering, the other Function buttons are set to Break-In, “BKI”, for button A and Speed, “SPD”, for button C. These let me quickly disable my paddle input if I will be moving about in the vehicle and want to avoid accidentally keying a string of dits or dahs, and also to make it easier to adjust my keying speed so that I can quickly match another op’s speed, which is a considerate thing to do.
I’ll have a better write-up of the installation, along with some photos, once I’ve completed the full installation.
As luck would have it, the local weather conditions have deteriorated sufficiently enough to prevent me from doing much radio activity with the new mobile antenna. Although, there may be a short window of time later today for me to get out to a park with it. Wish me luck.
This will be the final issue of Expired Ham for 2025. Thanks to anyone who reads these. December has been a good month for the blog. I’ve acquired 5 additional subscribers who receive copies of each article I post. That’s mainly been these Expired Ham updates each weekend, but sporadically, I’ll share a write-up on some topic during the week. In fact, I am hoping to do that more often in the coming new year. So, I hope you’ll all stick around for that.
I’m wishing you all a wonderful (and safe) New Year’s holiday. I hope you’re able to take some personal time to spend with family and friends and to welcome in a new year of fun and exciting amateur radio!
73,
Matthew, K2MAS
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