As I mentioned earlier…. VA3PCJ and myself were planning to attempt to get over to the Mer Blue Swamp (Ottawa South East) and let the FT817 play outside with the IC703… The main purpose of the outing was to start testing antennas for Jose as he has a trip coming up and we wanted to see which of the antennas would be easier to install with the idea of spending more time on the air rather than trying to get on the air…
Today we tested the Par end Fed QRP 10-20-40m end fed against the DK9SQ 10-40m vertical loop antenna
After playing around with installations and signal reports the Par end fed in a sloper configuration ended up being the antenna of choice for the day. The DK9SQ is a good antenna but for the time it takes to install and deploy we both agreed the Par seemed to be the winner.
More testing will be done later… but for today it was the Par…
It was not a bad day for band conditons and I managed a contact with special event station K2J in North Carolina on 20m and I broke the pile up to do with the FT817 and the Par…
My other contact was with VE3HUT (Ian in London Ontario) on 40m. I was just spinning the dial when I hear him describing his new antenna he had just built… 84 foot longwire…. 17 foot counterpoise and a 4:1 balun… HMMMMM where have I heard those specs before???? He then mentioned that he had built the antenna from specs he got from VA3QV…. and it was working fantastic for him… I had to jump in and thank him for his kind words about the antenna and the way I re worked it… The band was not the best for a QRP 40m ssb contact and the other fellow he was chatting with had to relay for me a couple of times but it was nice to talk to someone who was using one of my creations…
Tags: amateur radio, DK9SQ Loop, Icom IC 703, Par end Fed Antenna, W3EDP Antenna, Yaesu FT 817
