NA4IT Portable
Here are some pics of my portable station, set up at the Living Heritage Museum, in Athens TN on Aug 29th, 2015...
The portable mast is some fiberglass military masts, supported by a custom mount made from an old pickup truck bed extender.
I like the way it works, because I can still open the hatch on the Mountaineer.
The HF antenna is a 6 - 80M end fed wire, has 4:1 UNUN at the feed point at the top of the mast,
and
50 feet of wire sloping downward. NO GROUND RADIAL! The coax shield
acts as the ground. I had 65 feet of coax on it, with about 20 feet of
the length in a large coil under the table at the rig. I checked it on
3980 and it was a PERFECT match, no tuner needed there. The antenna and
tuner will operate EVERY frequency between 50 MHZ to 3.5 MHz. I had no
detectable RF problems. I could work every station I could hear. I
worked Voice SSB, 30W digital and WINMOR Winlink.
The VHF / UHF
antenna is a 2M / 70CM 1/4 wave mag mount on a metal plate at the top
of the mast, with a 19 inch "radial" attached the the underside of the
plate. Kinda works like a vertical dipole. I could be heard on simplex
with a full quieting signal 15 miles away.
The
"station" is actually the same setup I use at home... Yaesu FT-857D,
LDG AT-100ProII, Timewave DSP-9, and Signalink USB. It's all mounted to
a piece of board and slides into that wooden box you see. I did
use a 20A Astron power supply since I had AC power 10 feet away.
And of course, a pic of the operator having a ball! I'm looking forward to having more fun operating portable.