QRP
Afield September 2007 Craig LaBarge, WB3GCK |
It had been quite a few years since I've operated in the New England QRP Club's QRP Afield contest. Seems like something always seemed to come on those weekends. This year, I managed to get out and operate for a few hours. To make things simple, I decided to use a set up similar to the one I used for QRP to the Field in 2005. For an antenna, I grabbed an experimental whip antenna I had been tinkering with and attached it to the truck with a vise grip antenna mount. The whip antenna uses a homebrew coil with an 12-foot MFJ telescopic whip. I had never used it before, so I didn't really know if it was going to work for me or not. I got it to load up nicely on 20 meters but the SWR was a little high on 40 meters. I decided to "fudge it" on 40 meters and used my homebrew Z-match antenna tuner to bring the SWR down to 1:1 at the rig. It worked better on 40 meters that I expected.For logging, I was using an old Palm m105 handheld that I bought on eBay a few years ago. The logging sofware was GoLog by NK0E. It worked very well but, not having used it in a while, I was a little rusty at entering data using the stylus. By the end of the contest, though, I was really getting the hang of it. The bands seemed a little weak and noisey but, with 5 watts from my FT-817, this makeshift setup seemed to be getting out OK. This was nowhere near a record-breaking finish for me, but it was a fun afternoon on a beautiful day in Valley Forge. |
Operating location |
Antenna mount |
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