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.
Just as all the snow and ice from earlier in the month finally melts away, we are supposed to get a few more inches of the white fluffy stuff to make sure we remember what season we’re in. I made sure to bring my antenna wire inside this time so that I don’t end up in the predicament I found myself in after the last snow storm.
With the recent relatively warm weather, I made some progress on the FT-891 + ATAS-120 mobile installation. I bonded the ATAS-120 to the trunk lid via the Diamond K-400C antenna mount and some half-inch bonding strap I got months ago. The Diamond K-400S has a longer feed line, but since I placed the radio body in my trunk, the shorter feed line of the C model works best. I’ve got good continuity between the PL-259 mount and the trunk lid, however, I’m still unable to tune the ATAS onto the 15 meter band. Even 40 meters now sometimes has trouble. My guess is that I need to now bond the trunk lid to another body panel on the car and work my way through connecting more of the car electrically together until I get good tuning response across all the bands this antenna can tune. At any rate, I’ll be working on getting a guide together for the installation. At this point, I’m thinking of breaking it up into a few installments because it’s turned out to be a rather lengthy thing and I’ve got copious amounts of photographs during each stage of the installation. I didn’t think it was going to be such a process when I started.
This past weekend was a contest weekend. The ARRL International DX CW contest was held from Friday evening to Sunday evening (EST) and I casually hunted DX stations from my “little pistol” station. My performance would have been better, perhaps, if I were able to push more power through my antenna. My antenna can handle 100W, but the electronics in my home cannot. In particular, my smoke detectors will get tripped if I push anything higher than 20 to 23 watts on any band. It’s silly and extremely annoying. Anyway, with just 20 watts, even while many DX stations apparently had their tower-mounted Yagis pointed in our direction, some were still unable to hear me calling them back. I was excited to get an Australian contact though. That’s my furthest CW contact by far.
Did anyone else participate in the ARRL DX contest? Let me know how you did in the comments.
That’s all I’ve got for this week. Keep an eye out for the first of a few write-ups about the FT-891 installation which I hope I get shared this upcoming week.
VY 73,
Matthew, K2MAS
As a member of Amazon’s Associate program, I earn a small commission on qualifying purchases made through referrals. This helps offset the costs of hosting this website and are greatly appreciated.
K2MAS.net 