Thursday, July 14, 2011

Super Neat!

New try for contacts on 20 Meters from Adirondack State Park.  This time, the weapons of choice were the PFR-3A, the end fed wire and the counterpoise wire from the Buddistick kit.

Getting the wire up in the tree was a piece of cake.  Using the antenna line launcher, I was able to get the end of the wire up in a tree at about the 30 foot level.  It ended up being a kind of "Inverted L", sloper kind of affair. I had to unroll the Buddistick counterpoise wire almost all the way; but I was able to get the PFR-3A's internal SWR indicator to wink out, meaning a decent match was accomplished.

I called CQ without too much success; but I did answer the CQ of all persons - John ON4UN !!!


There was no pile-up considering John's celebrity status; and I got through on my first call!  Wowzers!  John gave me a 559 and he was a good 599.  There's no way he could be any less loud considering the beautiful antenna farm that he has.  If you've never seen it, just check out his QRZ page.  John was using his K3 and was running 1000 Watts.  Anyway, we spoke for a few moments and I mentioned I was running QRP to a wire in a tree.  He told me that my signal was decent for what I was using and that made my day.


Soon after that, a Dad and his two daughters came into the field to use it for some baseball hitting practice, so I packed it in and headed back to the cabin.  I didn't need to get pelted in the coconut with a baseball and from the looks of it, his girls could swing the bat pretty well!

I still wasn't able to get a decent match on 40 Meters, so I'll have to do a little more research with wire lengths before Flight of the Bumblebees.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!

1 comment:

  1. Nice to make contacts like that!
    Great job Larry.

    ReplyDelete