Ms B and I built a long wire antenna. It tool a while to measure for the length! It's way too long for a small flat.
Design was based on this: https://udel.edu/~mm/ham/randomWire/
"A standard recommendation (see QST, March 1936, p. 32, "An Unorthodox Antenna") is an 84' long end fed and a 17' long counterpoise (6.5' for 20m). While these lengths have been shown to work well on many bands, which is helpful if you're in a hurry to get on the air, read up on the topic and experiment."
We managed to test the antenna in July - it works very well!
Ms B and I measured and built a 20m dipole to hang between the front door and the kitchen door in our corridor.
It works flawlessly. SWR is < 1.5 w/o a tuner, it receives reasonably well and it has revolutionised my 20m here. We also built another one which was measured incorrectly but I'll be measuring and cutting that for 17m at a later day.
When I was demonstrating Ms B how to measure and build a dipole I did't realise it'd dominate my usage!
This was before we built the 20m which also made a massive impact. It also helped that we had built the dipole just as 10 openings were starting. Right now in early September 10m and 6m are slowly dying so 20 is truly dominating my ratings. It is still the 2nd most popular band here.
It's hard to see but there's a 9-band HF/VHF/UHF antenna tied to the back of the bike. In the end I didn't use this, just used a 2/70cm dual bander, that worked well too. Then on Sunday's ride we chained Ms B's bike onto a rail and then I realised I left the keys at home - 70 miles away. That was my day on the bank holiday Monday.
We took the FT-818 up the hill next to the church and with the magmount and 2/70cm dual-band antenna on top of the car managed to catch the ISS part of this call for about 7 minutes, with M7 controlling the dial. It was very exciting!
A while back I stumbled upon VK3YE's excellent video about building a mag loop antenna out of a bicycle wheel.
Building some type of loop like this has been in my mind for a long time so I shopped for variable capacitors that could handle this on eBay and got some junk. They weren't cheap. Overall I spent way too much money on this antenna compared to something off the shelf like a number of Am-Pro sticks could have been bought but that's not the fun (or frustration) part of it.
I have had some MTB wheels in the garage for years, collected from bikes that have gone to the Rust section of the Silicon Heaven.
So finally this Saturday I got off the couch and wandered down to the garage.
After checking out the two front and two back spares, I picked the one that's in worst shape, a front wheel with scored rims which came out of an old Raleigh bike i had picked up from Freecycle which was beyond any meaningful repair. The rim was in a relatively good rust-free shape and the spokes were mainly OK so I removed those carefully, losing only a couple of spokes in the process, lots of spare parts were generated as a result which is good.
Then I cut the wheel into two using my little hacksaw. These two steps were the most time consuming parts. Using a wire brush I cleaned the inside of the wheel which was very dirty, and it was ready to be taken upstairs.
Since this was just a test, I didn't solder anything, in any case soldering a metal to such a large piece of metal definitely requires a blowtorch, you can't do this using a normal soldering iron so physical connections were done using screws. I put my capacitor that came out of an ECM into a box and created a dial using some cartoon out of an ice cream pack, linked that to the wheel using crocodile clips. It's not ideal but it's OK for a little QRP work around 1-5W.
Then I screwed the ground in the middle and created a gamma match as VK3YE described, built out of a spoke which was screwed back into the wheel.
Overall this gave a reasonable match. It was close but still needed an ATU on most frequencies. I could hear a lot of places but 28MHz and similar upper HF bands were dead so I left it like this.
In this setup it is basically a folded very short dipole with a capacitor to make it in tune. It's efficiency is very low but works.
Later in the evening, I tried the "magnetic" part of the loop, which is actually caused by a magnetic coupling. I put a thick wire in place with the help of some wires and also created an ugly balun since I wasn't sure how balanced this thing was. Both helped and also 28MHz opened up.
So, in the end I managed start my longest-distance-ever QSO using this, into Brazil on 28MHz FT8! Just under 10k distance. I was calling the Brazilian op using this antenna, and then he didn't reply and continued working others so I gave up. Couple of minutes he replied! I was only using 2.5W on this so I didn't want to miss them, quickly checked the FT-847 which also could hear him, gave him a reply using the dipole hanging in the corridor using 10W and we managed to exchange signal reports and 73s. Very exciting!
On the other hand when I tried it on Monday, it wouldn't work. Hearing is fine but causes way too much RFI and the USB interface to FT-818 shuts down, which terminates the radio TX. I need to figure out why it's causing so much interference with anything over 0.5W - and with that no one can hear me.
I finally plugged the antenna on 26 in the study to the FT-847. Good reception.
But no spots.
I struggled very badly, 20W, antenna nicely balanced, receives well, no signal
After three days I gave up and moved it to the other room where FT-818 is. It received somewhat better, but not stellar. Then suddenly I started to have "RF in the Shack" issues with the USB interfaces and the radio. I gave up.
Today after work I tried again, no luck.
Then it dawned on me, neither radio have a good earth. I did the worst possible earthing on the FT-818, replied a CQ message, and bang got a contact.
Since them I'm still struggling to make a contact, that's normal with QRP, but I am being spotted and I am hearing quite well as well.
So - we hit the buy button for an inflatable HF antenna. It arrived last Monday and I procrastinated for a week. Finally it's been inflated, hanging off a curtain rail.
I haven't really tried it with TX, I called a single stream of CQ into 14Mhz FT8 but didn't pursue, I had to get on with work.
We've been to Hayling Island, walked around, and then set up an HF station.
First I made the mistake of leaving the radio on USB instead of Digi. That wasted half an hour.
Then we switched to the right setting and immediately did a QSO but our luck dried after that. We tried some FT4, no luck. Antenna tuned onto 17m band as well but it was empty.
14MHz was VERY busy and we really couldn't cut through with 2.5W so I brought the big battery from the car and still with 5W we suffered. We could see that we were being heard on the PSK Reporter but no one was answering. People don't want to work with low signals, which is weird since FT8 is inherently a weak signal mode. We should seek for those with lower signal values.
Regardless, we had fun. Finally we were too cold so we packed up.
Then I switched to pushbike mobile. That's a very cheap 2/70cm antenna attached to the bike. I cycled around and tried to have contacts back to the car. The FT65 couldn't make a contact with the rubber duck clearly but with this it was crystal clear. Still the other end did suffer so we should have switched antennas at the top of the car but giving instructions over the bad link was too cumbersome so I cycled back.
This is the antenna, 14MHz end-fed with a 49:1 UnUn. Works very well.
It was fun. I did 6 contacts and M7 did one. We used the FT-818 and the cheap Nagoya 2/70cm clone next to the potted plants in front of the window, vertically and we still made some contacts.
I also tried the 70cm ZL Special inside but that didn't work well.
On the left, the 6-piece fibre pole I had purchased from a ham rally early 2000s, on the right the fibre pole I purchased this year.
They are for different purposes, the one on the left can carry a massive, heavy 10+ element 2m yagi antenna w/o a big deal, the one on the right is can cope with carrying small wire antennas or flags but it's significantly lighter and dead easy to use too.
I put an ethernet cable around the study reaching out to the radio, plonked a cheap USB sound card and the Pi, with my old USB to Serial adapter into it and voila, it works with VNC quite well, CAT and the lot.
There are future experiments to be made, like using something faster than VNC but it works, apart from 6m.
At 6m the cables are getting interference and the TX'ed signal is horrible. Needs more investigation.
Other thing to look into is the audio cables, right now they are electrically connected. That needs to go, all of that cable stuff needs to be replaced with the audio/TTL connection kit I'm working on. That'd give me both octo-couplers for the serial side and also audio transformers on the other side. Anyway, we'll get there.
