Amateur (Ham) Radio BS and Callsign Thread!

Cuz I'm all on board with that. With buttons lol

 

Next week is the New England QSO Party. If anyone is on, I'll be working a mobile station through the mountains for two days straight. Mostly phone but I will be supplementing some digital (psk31) in there as well.

This year I'm making an honest effort to place.

 

Please post pics and dets for ur mobile station.....or is this your truck rig?


Looking for ideas on a radio in a box

 

What bands?

 

Short answer. Mostly 40. But I do have an nvis 80 for local at night

Long answer.
I'll probably focus on primarily 40/20. I'll definitely check out 10 with all the action it's seen lately. And then at night I'll probably hit 80m for some local action.

20m will be king for the majority of time. There's no band/mode multiplier. So there's no real benefit to band hoping outside of working different skips and obviously night work. Our multipliers are States, Can provs, and DX countries. My mobile set up is very effective working dx so I might try to capitalize on that for the bulk of the day.

 

My mobile is my truck. The nice thing about the box is you can just disconnect the cables to leave in the truck, and then I just put the box on a table with the short cables and it's done in two minutes.


It'll be this set up this time. A mix between my mobile roof antenna (atas-120) and my endfed while portable.

Last Pic shows the atas

 

I like the inverted camo net pole setup.

 

OK. I'm just south of Fryeburg in the hills looking right at Mt. Washington 80 in the evening probably will work fine I'll be listening on and off evenings should be fine.

 

Thanks! Gets the job done. Works really well when I stack them 36' high on the ice during the winter. Lots of ropes for that one.

I might still look for a different solution that involves either a bracket on my roof rack or one in the bed.

I need to play around and see if there's and adverse effects with the length of the grounding wire being too long, within the range of the trucks height.

Then again some folks put these transformers in trees so we will see

 

15 meter beam on fiberglass poles. The aluminum element tubes fit inside one another gives me 10-15 meters, 20 won't cut it unless I build a truss to support the elements it just too long. It is somewhat directional so I can turn it from the ground level. At the back of the camper is a hinged mount on the rear bumper that allows me to assemble the whole thing walk it up and put the pin in to hold it up right it is guyed also because it's 20' up. I built this for ARRL field day to be used as the GOTA station (get on the air)

 

Well. Tonight was an adventure. Had a lot already. But finally tally.

Grounding.

• Front corners of cab to front panels
• Rear corner of cab to bed sides
• Bed sides to Frame
• Rear cab to Frame
• Front cab to frame
• Headers, front and rear of cat, in front and rear of muffler to frame
• Front panels to hood

That achieved me a drop from S9 to S5. Progress, but still have a ways to go. Next im going to try and bond each individual cross bar to the side plates of the roof rack to see if that helps as well.

 

When this is over, I'll buy the beer and we'll prep the truck for HF mobile. Maybe install a lift too. It'll have to be a good case of brew.

 

So many lessons learned. But all a part of the trouble shooting process. Time to go clean home depot out of their stainless hardware.

 

No grounds on the rotatable dipole other than the radio return path. My camper screwdriver antenna gets a earth ground rod it does help at 80 meters, it also has a home made radial system on the base mounting below the antenna. The Tarheel screwdriver on the back corner of the truck is just body grounded 51 countries mobile. It is a myth that a vehicle is a ground plane on HF frequencies it acts more like a capacitor the actual ground plane is the ground below the vehicle and it is very lossy, ground losses are in the 5- 20 ohm range the ground losses are roughly equivalent to a capacitor with a value of between .004 uF to .002 uF and frequency dependent. Basically operating mobile HF even at a 100 watts you are QRP. but it never ceases to amaze me how well one can do with a PW signal!

 

Yeah I can't wait til this grounding mess is done. I'm hoping it's just an "ah-ha" moment and the last strap drops the noise down to an acceptable level.

 

Anyone have experience with APRS weather stations/CWOP? I'm building a few remote weather stations and am considering data transmission options. Some stations will be within cell reception areas and I can use a Particle Boron or Arduino MKR NB 1500 to upload data to a server. But there are some locations where cell reception will not be available and I think APRS should be available.

I'd like to collect data on a microcontroller, send it to a homemade TNC, and transmit on a handheld.

 

I don't know anything about this but I've been poking around here trying to learn. http://www.wxqa.com/stations.html

I use this website when I want to check the weather in more remote areas that I want to visit. Just change the Region at the top. https://mesowest.utah.edu/cgi-bin/droman/mesomap.cgi?state=CO

 

3 more hours in today.
God this mobile is a pain in the ass
Still can't get the noise out.

https://youtu.be/mXWS4jqWKXY

 

At what point could it be in the unit rather than the vehicle?

 

What do you mean?