Lunchtime QSOs

I was able to make it out to the park for some lunchtime QSOs for the first time in almost two weeks. I was disappointed to tune across the 20 Meter band; only to hear not much. It seemed that calling CQ was in order; so I plunked myself on 14.038 MHz and let the K1's memory keyer do its stuff.

A short while later, I was rewarded by a call from Will K9FO. Will and I have worked before in NAQCC Sprints; and he shows up in my logbook a lot. This was the first time I've heard him during my lunchtime QRP efforts.

It turned out that Will and a bunch of Ham Radio friends were in a local park enjoying a picnic get together. He was using a KX1 to a 20 Meter vertical loop at 4 Watts out. His signal was anywhere from 559 to 579 depending on the QSB.

After leaving the air to go and start cooking burgers for everyone for lunch, Will handed the key off to Don K9KNZ. We chatted for a bit and Don filled me in a bit more on the 20 Meter vertical loop. When I asked him to e-mail me with the specs of the portable 20 Meter loop that they were using; Don just suggested that I Google it - so I did. Here are two interesting links that I found for 20 Meter loops:

http://www.iw5edi.com/ham-radio/?dl2hcb-multiband-delta-loop,28

http://www.dxzone.com/cgi-bin/dir/jump2.cgi?ID=9313

I'm not sure if either of these pages details exactly what they were using; but I'm sure it's probably pretty close.

By the way, I found out that you can literally spend hours looking at all the antenna pages on dxzone.com. There are so many plans and so many ideas there - truly a wealth of information.

73 de Larry W2LJ