ND2E's Blog

The HexBeam is up and working, thanks to the help of Dave Wilson, N4DW. He came over Friday and helped me put the antenna on the mast. I spent the rest of the day pushing and pulling things around until the antenna was at the limits of the mast, 30 ft up in the air. All the guys are tight, although sometime in July I will need to check the tension. Hopefully the antenna is up and won’t get blown down like the last time.

I spent about eight hours over the weekend playing radio during Field Day. I put my big battery pack on the power bus and ran 1E. Logged 84 contacts (4 duplicates) during those 8 hours. Did PSK and RTTY with no voice or CW operations. The more often I work contests, the more I understand the rules and work at improving my score through better operation.

I wanted to run digital since it scores the same as CW. So for the first hour I ran PSK. During that hour I logged 21 contacts all PSK. With the HexBeam running it was possible to hold the frequency. Running 40-50 watts with a beam really gives you command.

During the next hour I logged 15 contacts-14 PSK, 1 RTTY. The limited number of PSK stations was making it more difficult to find non-dupe stations to contact.

By the third hour I only had four contacts-all PSK. The fifth hour was four also, RTTY only. Sixth hour was four RTTY and three PSK.

I went to dinner and came back several hours later, so starting at 00:30Z ish I continued to log between four and five contacts per hour until I gave up at 02:45Z. I did a little better Sunday morning running about six per hour evenly mixed between RTTY and PSK. Again after taking a break for church and lunch, I came back and ran for another 30 minutes…That finally got my total up to the 80s.

Moral of the story, for field day at least you cant run digital mode without CW capabilities if you want to place well. Also being limited to 20M and up – no 40M or 80M antenna of any type, limits the number of stations that are available during the night-and night seems like it is the majority of the contest. I know that it isn’t the biggest part but when the traffic slows down it sure seems long.

One other issue, LotW should be the final depository of all of our logs. I like eQSL and now that CQ Magazine is honoring eQSL QSLs they have a nice advantage but as an ARRL member I sure wish we would use our native logging depository. I do both LotW and eQSL. Good logging programs can handle uploads to both systems so there should be no hesitation in using both.

Today was a long day that should have been short. Started out this morning to safety check the rigging before putting the antenna up top. The last thing I want is for the beast to collapse while I am underneath it. All checked out, had to redo some of the rigging knots because I prefer bolines to fisherman knots on line that absolutely will be under strain.

Seems that I forgot to prep any coax…duh. Well going through my stock of things trying to find just the right stuff. Had 2 lengths of RG-213…that is about 1.6dB loss per 100 feet. Need something better. I have a 100 feet of LMR 240 UF – about 2 dB loss, not good. How about some LMR 400? Nothing long enough. Either I am going to use the RG or I will have to break out my stash of Heilax.

I have several lengths of 1/2 inch heilax that was donated by friends in Dallas before I moved. But, do I have connectors and adapters? After much scrounging around in the junk box I found the adapters to go from the Heliax Ns to UHFs so I can get the coax past the house connectors. I will have to change things one of these days when I finally get everything installed.

So, I spent several hours hunting for thngs before I got to the task of terminating the Heliax. Of course the hunk of coax I chose ws the oddball 1/2 inch superflex not the standard half inch stuff. Now where are the other connector?

All is done, the coax is hanging from the underside of the deck and tomorrow the XYL and I will put the antenna on the mast. That will leave Friday to test and get ready for Field Day on Saturday. Hopefully I will operate here, in Kingsport with the Kingsport Club and hopefully with the Johnson City club. It will be a busy Saturday running here and there and at 6:30 running down to the Maple Grove in Unicoi for a Morris family reunion.

Well yesterday was fun. Finally got every thing working. Today’s chore is to get the 2nd level guys, the rotator and the 3rd level guys in place so I can install the antenna and push the mast up to its full height.

The last time I did not set the guys tight enough to overcome the initial stretch in the double braid dacron line, this time I will set them tight. Hopefully the mast will stay up during the East TN winds.

Have the 2nd and 3rd level guys up and very lightly tensioned so I can push the pole up and bring it back down. Tomorow is fix a couple of things like turn the rotator to the proper direction, test it to make sure it is still working, and rearrange one of the guys to relocate one of the turnbuckles.

All looks ok so far but I still need to make sure it stays vertical.

I hope the weather holds today since i an trying to get my big wideband HexBeam back in the air.

Last Christmas we had a really wild wind storm and the guys were not tight enough or the dacron double braid I used for the guys really stretched. Either way the big beam came down and cracked several spreaders.

I spliced the broken pieces several times but they continued to fail. I got tired of trying to do half-hearted repairs and ordered new fiberglass for the broken parts. Got all of that put together last week. While waiting for the epoxy joints to cure and my bank account to recover, I planted a couple of 4x4s to serve as guy anchors and to reduce the guy length a bit. They will also serve as the mounts for a Force 12 Sigma GT5, 5 band vertical as well as an experimental short vertical that will also be used as the support for a 2 meter j-pole.

Well anyway I am off to the hardware store to buy guy material and a couple of other things I need.