Giving the KX1 a workout...............

I sat down Friday early evening to get used to the KX1 and it's functions, almost having to relearn all the in's and outs of the radio again. It has been some time since I used the KX1 but it did not take to long to get the hang of things again. This was the first time the Palm paddle got a good workout as well. It is very smooth and I do like it a lot more than the paddle that is offered by Elecraft for the KX1 the KXPD1. So with the time that I had I hooked the KX1 up to the attic 20 meter dipole and gave my 1.5 watts a whirl and the results are below.

F5NBX

 F5NBX Fred had a fantastic signal into Canada and was working lots of calls from all over North America. I was able to seek in with a 559 report from  him. It was a fast QSO's as he

It's time for the KX1 to head to the UK.....................

My trip to the UK is fast approaching and the trip would not be complete if I didn't try to fit some radio time in. All my paper work (CEPT permit) is in order for me to operate as M/VE3WDM. I will be using my Elecraft KX1 radio while in the UK. In a previous post I found the Pelican 1060

It's time for the High Sierra Sidekick to go....

It would seem the High Sierra Sidekick is not going to do the job in the attic. I have tried it on many bands using WSPR to see what the results would be and they turned out to be dismal. My plan for putting it up into the attic was to could get more use than I was getting from it and I would also have avail to a lot more Amateur bands. With the tests that I did  it turns out the Dipoles in the attic do a much better job. So I am now going to have to consider other antenna ideas focusing on dipole or horizontal type antennas. Ideally I would like something from 15 to 40 meters. (10 meters seems to cause troubles in the shack) There is the MFJ loop antenna that I was close to purchasing but held off on wanting to see how the Sidekick performed. So the High Sierra Sidekick is up for sale now and I will post the news of that here first before it goes up for open sale. It comes with 50 feet of coax, the antenna control box and the jaws antenna mount. The antenna has had about 2 to 3 months of total on air time as it was only out and used during

ULTRA PRICEY SERVICE.....or UPS

Well it happen to me again the first time I said would be the last............some time ago I ordered an item from the U.S and was told it would be shipped UPS. I was informed that this was the only service they used and would get to me the fastest. Hmmm I thought how good is that.....to good to be true it turned out. When the ham radio item arrived I was smacked with a brokerage fee that was out of this world. I called UPS thinking there was a mistake but no this was the fee that was charged. So from that point on I vowed to never use  this service even for local

30 meter WSPR dual...dipole vs vertical

Well maybe 20 meters was not a fair comparison between the two attic antennas as the 20 meter dipole is a 1/4 wave. So I decided to go to 30 meters. Here we have the 30 meter dipole which is two mobile whip antennas in a horizontal layout. The Sidekick is a vertical but I would think more in line with the mobile whips for a fair comparison. So it was back to WSPR to see how the vertical fairs against the dipole.

Attic dipole vs attic vertical using WSPR

20 meters with dipole

Saturday afternoon I had a chance to compare the 20 meter attic dipole to the attic vertical (High Sierra Sidekick) using WSPR. I tried 40 but there was lots of CW action and some local noise that really did not allow me to do a good comparison so here are the 20 meter results. The power output was 4 watts.

20 meters with vertical

Making attic radails safe......

radials with exposed ends

As you know from a recent post I moved the High Sierra Sidekick to the attic and one area that was still left undone was the antenna radials and making sure they were RF safe. Julian G4ILO brought to my attention the possible RF that could be at the end of the radials even with 5 watts. So over the weekend I was brain storming as to what to do to make the radials safe. To begin with the radials are insulated 14 gauge wire but at the ends there is some exposed wire and potentially a problem that I don't want to have. Some of the radials were just looped at the end and others had a plastic insulator that had to be removed. Some of the ideas I toyed

Some wall paper arrived today........

Who said an attic dipole with only 500 milliwatts will go nowhere !!

QRP ARCI award  oh and by all means click to enlarge!

Adding to a attic antenna farm.....

A new addition to the family click to enlarge all photos

Well the snow has finally cleared and the warm weather seems to just be on the horizon by the weekend it is supposed to be 20C. To celibate the warm weather I felt it was time to do some attic antenna additions. A few posts ago I compared the attic dipoles against the vertical outdoor Sidekick. The results were not in favor of the

Welcome to April 3rd

NEED I SAY MORE...........WERE THE HECK IS SPRING ALREADY!!!!!!!

Vertical vs Dipole on 20 meters WSPR

It was now time to try 20 meters and see how my High Sierra sidekick did against my attic 20 meter dipole. I did the comparison on an overcast Sunday afternoon. The solar conditions were SFI =108 A=20 K=3 solar wind was up around 575 and sunspots 66. The solar wind was high but both antennas are being compared during the same conditions. Now as you can tell by the pictures in the links above the vertical antenna is not in an ideal location but then

Vertical vs Dipole on 30 meters WSPR

For the first time in about 9 months I put  my High Sierra Sidekick antenna out on it's mount in the backyard for the QRP-ARIC contest . As time would have it the XYL and I were out most of the day on Saturday purchasing items that we need  for our trip to Europe in May. So there was not much time for the contest at all so I thought I would try a little experiment. I wanted to compare how the Sidekick mounted in the backyard by the