SOTA Trip to Steptoe Butte

On Sunday, August 4, I went a little beyond my regular picnic table QRP sort of laid back operating. With some spare time while visiting in eastern Washington, I decided to do a SOTA activation of Steptoe Butte.

Summits On The Air is an award scheme for radio amateurs and shortwave listeners that encourages portable operation in mountainous areas. See http://www.sota.org.uk . Basically "Activators" operating from mountain summits and "Chasers" both get credit towards awards.

Steptoe Butte rises about 1000 ft above the Palouse farm country. Located 50 miles south of Spokane, WA. it is within sight of Idaho. It is a state park with easy access to the summit.

As a SOTA activator I hiked the last feet to the summit and then set up my KX3 at the edge of the Steptoe Butte summit overlook. There are no trees on the summit so I strapped my 18' crappie pole to a rock pedestal, using it to support the high point of my 20 mtr end fed zepp.

I had posted to the SOTAwatch2 database an announcement of my intention to activate Steptoe Butte. My first CQ was picked up by the Reverse Beacon Network, compared to SOTA database and an activation spot automatically posted to the same SOTAwatch2 database. Instantly any SOTA chaster knew my frequency and operating status. I'm used to calling CQ for a while and getting one or, at most, two responses...suddenly it felt like I had a pileup to work, unfortunately I've no practice working pileups. In less than two hours I did work 15 stations in 9 states but I could have done better.

Notes to self for the next time:
- Copy directly to a log sheet rather than my QSO pad
- Avoid using my cellphone clock requiring me to punch it to get the current time
- Narrow selectivity first
- Use RIT to tune through the pileup for calls

and, a related safety item:
- If the antenna is within easy reach of curious public, hang a "Do Not Touch" note on it.

Hopefully next time I won't leave so many chasers without a QSO.

Phased C-Pole Antennas for some Gain

How many times have we seen 18 wheelers with CB verticals mounted on their mirrors? Doing this, truckers add a little gain on 11 mtrs. With proper spacing this works even better on 20 meters.

Today was a sunny day here in SE MN. The temperature was in the low 70s and there was no sign of rain. It was a great day to meet Rodney, KD0EBT, and Steve, KD0ORM, for a little KX3 time at Rochester's Essex Park. My August 23, 2010 blog post proposing that two C-Poles be fed in phase is based on information in the ARRL Antenna Handbook. Information there states that two verticals fed in phase and spaced 5/8 wavelengths apart exhibit almost 5dB gain over a single vertical. My experiments today seem to confirm this information.

I already have one self supporting 20 mtr C-Pole antenna. I built a second 20 mtr C-Pole. This one hangs from a tree limb like W5USJ 's. A little searching around Essex Pack identified a tree with some open space to the south. I merely hung one C-Pole in that tree and set my self supporting C-Pole about 44' (5/8 wavelength on 14.1 MHz) to the south. This put the two broadside to the east/west. I fed each of the antennas with 50' lengths of LMR-400 low loss coax. At the rig I had a short coax jumper to a tee, connecting my KX3 to both antennas. I let the KX3 internal turner take care of any mismatch caused by driving the two 50 ohm C-Poles in parallel. Measurements using the Reverse Beacon Network showed that these two C-Poles fed in phase and spaced 5/8 wavelength apart really can have 5 dB gain over a single C-Pole.

Now I've another portable antenna option for those days in the park.

80 Mtr Vertical Performance

I wondered if my 80 mtr top loaded vertical is a good antenna for the Bruce Kelley Memorial 1929 CW QSO Party. Part of the loading is the top 6' of two of the guys. Any sway at all causes a guy to sag a little shifting the load my Hartley sees. This causes my signal to FM/wobble...distracting to say to least and aggravating if the band is crowded. I needed to know if the gain offered by the vertical over my endfed wire was enough to outweigh the the wobble it introduced.

The reverse beacon network at http://www.reversebeacon.net/ allowed me to get a good idea of real antenna performance. All I had to do is call CQ and any reverse beacon stations hearing me automatically posts my call, frequency and signal strength to the web. By switching between my low endfed wire and my vertical I could get a good A vs B comparison. By doing this over a period of time I could see how changing nighttime propagation impacts this comparison. Monday night I did exactly this and then sorted though the data to see how the two antennas compare from about 8PM (2:00 UTC) through the next morning.

What I found was that for the east coast (PA) the vertical offered 8-10 dB gain throughout the night. While not always a spectacular performer it is almost always better than my endfed wire...but signal reports all mention the wobble/FMing introduced by antenna sway. Based on this I'll stick with my endfed wire for the early evening hours and then switch after about 10PM when the band activity dies down a little.

For next year's Bruce Kelley QSO Party it would be nice to have this problem solved by building a '29 style amplifier to use with my Hartley. Fortunately my 1934 transmitter already has an amplifier stage in between the oscillator and the antenna. My vertical will work fine with this transmitter during the AWA Linc Cundall Memorial CW Contest in January.