Yesterday afternoon VA3PCJ and myself managed to find a little bit of time to head over to the Mer Blue Swamp area of Ottawa and set up in a Parking lot by the walking trail and play radio for a couple of hours. We left my QTH at 1400 and made it back home before 1700 and had a great time. The main purpose of the trip (outside of fresh air and having fun) was to test out some changes that Jose made to the setup he uses with the S9 vertical when he is operating portable.
Yesterdays test was switching out the wire that runs up the outside (not inside) the telescopic pole to a thinner gage wire. The wire that comes with the antenna is designed to run inside the tubing and is more robust and heavy. This works fine if you are leaving the antenna up in a permanant installation like they suggest. In the portable setup that Jose uses it for the antenna is attached to the trailer hitch of his jeep then we attach the wire to the top section of the pole and then extend it vertically (wire is outside the telescopic tube) till all the sections are out and the antenna is at its 43 foot length. The weight of the supplied wire causes the end of pole to bend slightly which means we have slack in the wire and its no longer at the 43 foot length.
Yesterdays test was a success as with the thinner, lighter wire the tubing did not bend and the antenna was now deployed at its proper height. Using the IC703 and the built in tuner contacts were made on seveal bands. The test was a success…
Seeing that we were there anyway…. I set up my FT817 and the Par End Fed 10-20-40 qrp end fed antenna at the other end of the parking lot and spun the dial….
My first contacts were on 40m on 7.055 where I checked into the Trans Provincal Net with VE3GZJ Steve in Sudbury Ontario. While talking to him a few more jumped in to say hi and I was able to exchange signal reports with Shawn VE3PSV from Cambridge Ontario and Simon VE3/G4GCK who is currently operating portable from Toronto Ontario.
After those contacts I moved up to 20m to visit with W9RMA Ron in Wisconsin who was the NCS for the hour on the Maritime Mobile Service Net on 14.300. He also gave me a good report concidering I was operating QRP…
I should mention that when I’m operating QRP a good report is anything I can get… 5/9 …5/7 … even 4/4 ,,, are really not important as long as you can hear me…. I know I am only using 5w and I know my antenna is a 40 foot lenght of wire tossed up in a tree… The fact you can hear me and make out what I am saying is all that matters and the numbers are only window dressing…
After trying a couple of station who had really good signals (and were attracting pileups I could not break) such as EA1ARD and KP2/W6DXO I spun the dial back to 7.055 and heard Norm VE3NLH/m as he was driving from Kirkland Lake back to his QTH in Englehart Ontario.
On the above map “A” is where Norm was and “B” is where he was going… And Ottawa is at the bottom…
I tossed out my call and Norm heard it and we had a nice chat for a few minutes. 5W and a chunka wire to a mobile about 300 miles away is a good contact any way I look at it…
The above picture was taken a few years back now… but I doubt that Norm would of lowered his standards if he replaced the gear or the car. So you can see the antenna is top rate and from many times working him as he has driven across this province and a couple of states I can tell you it does work…
Granted Norm has a really good mobile setup with an excellent antenna but no matter how good his gear was he had to hear a booming 5w signal coming his way so I will say that both stations were working fine…
After working with Norm I spun the dial just up a bit and heard VA3YG Brent talking to someone on 7.065. His signal dropped suddenly as he said… “There now transmitting at 5w” so I just had to break in and get a quick QRP to QRP Contact… We exchanged reports and then I continued to look around for contacts….
The last contact of the day was rather interesting… I heard S57DX on the air before and he always commands a huge pile up… He was running the full legal limit and there was quite a few stations wanting to get him in the log including one little QRP station in Ottawa 
… After about 10 minutes of throwing out VA3QV in several different phonetic styles I thought well lets try this…. and I let go with my callsign followed by several QRP…QRP…QRP… and when I unkeyed I heard…. Every one stand by…. OK the QRP…QRP…QRP… station go ahead… So the pile up was halted and I gave my callsign along with a signal report… Slavo (station operator) took the 5/9+20 I offered and he graciously gave me an honest 5/7. Slovenia to Ottawa with a QRP Portable setup.
Not something that is really rare as guys do it in CW all the time but to do it SSB is a little more challenging to say the least…
While Jose and myself were comparing notes about the contacts of the afternoon we also suddenly realised that it was getting later than we expected and so we packed up the toys and headed back to our end of Ottawa before the XYL’s sent out a search party for us… I made it home in time for supper so all ended well…
Hope your day went as well as mine did…
73bob
Tags: amateur radio, Amateur Radio Portable Ops, Maritime Mobile Service Net, S57DX, TPN, Trans Provincal Net, VE3NLH
June 24, 2012 at 2:21 am |
I just worked S57DX myself, Bob. What a super station he has
Fun to do with QRP…
June 24, 2012 at 2:36 am |
His station makes operating QRP easy… also thanks for the 6m contact today…
73bob