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 was tied up yesterday and didn’t get this post written in time to get it published. Sorry about that.
The rest of my FT-891 mobile installation gear arrived recently. After trying a couple seat bolt mounting solutions from LIDO and RAM only to find that the seats in my car are incompatible with those mounts, I ended up getting the simple CD player mount from LIDO. This is an ingenious little contraption that installs in seconds and seems to be sturdy enough to effectively handle the weight of the FT-891 control head. But that’s about as far as I’d trust it. When it comes to pressing buttons on the control head, I’m worried that the amount of pressure you need to make the button do its buttoning would cause the CD player port on the car’s dash to start breaking. Notice I’m worried about the car’s stuff breaking and not the LIDO mount. The LIDO mount itself, for how small it is, is surprisingly rugged-feeling in the hand. This will probably be significantly different in other vehicles depending on where the CD player port is, but in my car, it is situated such that mounting the control head for the FT-891 there puts it in perfect view and location for ease of access while placing it out of the way of other things going on in the car. I’m anxious to get out with it and see how it performs in an actual on-air operation.
Speaking of on-air operations, this weekend was the North American QSO Party CW contest and sadly, I didn’t get to participate in any of it due to local weather preventing me from getting an antenna in the air. I truly envy you all who can put up permanent antennas. The SSB phone version of the event is coming up in a couple of weeks. Maybe I’ll do some phone ops this year. Or maybe not. We’ll see. Hi hi.
I made enough progress on my CW call sign sending trainer app that I have made the source code publicly available on my Github account. The app is a simple HTML file that you can download to your computer. Double-clicking the file will open the app in your web browser where you can then begin sending call signs that are automatically generated for you by the app. To interact with the app, the preferred way is to interface your iambic paddles to your computer using the VBand USB adapter (or similar interface). This ensures that you are practicing with equipment that you’ll actually use on the air. If you lack the proper interface hardware, don’t fret, you can use a couple keyboard shortcuts in place of paddle inputs. Some PC keyboards have left and right Control keys which can be used as a left and right paddle input, respectively. If you are using a Mac, you may only have a left Control key, in which case you can use the left and right square brace keys, that is [ or ], as your left and right paddle inputs. Straight key and Bug support is on the future feature list and is not currently available. Check out the app and let me know how it works out for you. I welcome any feedback, good or bad. The app is written in JavaScript, so if you know a bit of JavaScript and want to collaborate on building new features, please reach out to me. I’m no programmer, to be sure, but can make do after looking up how to do things.
If you read last week’s newsletter, you may recall I said that I was reading through old issues of QST print magazines that I’ve hoarded since I first got licensed in 2014. In the Hints & Kinks section of the January 2015 issue a reader submitted a hint about how to ensure your Diamond K400 mount and ATAS-120a antenna can tune properly. He mentioned problems tuning 15 meters with the setup and described the exact issue as it plays out for me with my setup. His tuning issue was present whether he had bonded the K400 mount to the vehicle’s body or not. The only solution was to ensure that the set screws on the bottom of the mount were in contact with actual metal of the car’s body. This seems odd to me, but it tracks with what I’ve heard elsewhere. It would seem that Diamond has since decided to supply a metal insert that fits between the set screws and the car’s body where you mount it, but still, there must be metal to metal contact for a good bond to be made I guess. Given the fact that I still cannot tune the ATAS-120a on 15 meters, I must complete the bonding work that I want to get done. I have a few lengths of 1/2″ bonding strap as well as some bare copper bonding straps in one-foot lengths that are a little narrower, but still should work well. At a minimum, I should be able to bond the K400 mount to the trunk lid and also the metal bar insert where the set screws pinch up against will get bonded to the trunk lid. I may do the set screw bar first and test before spending possibly unnecessary time on the rest of the mount. I’ve seen many videos online where hams were bonding just about everything they could find on their vehicles all the way down to bonding their exhaust to their vehicle’s frame. I’m not going to go that far with this unless it seems extremely necessary. With the performance of this install from my last POTA outing, it doesn’t seem like that level of bonding will be necessary with this vehicle. But I can’t tune 15 meters, so some bonding will be required.
Not much else going on around these parts so far this year. Apart from the rain and high winds, we’ve had decent outdoors temperatures, so maybe we’ll get through the rest of Winter with some mild weather. That would certainly invite me to get out and about with the radio stuff a bit more.
Take care everyone and have a great week ahead!
73,
Matthew, K2MAS
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