You would think it’s a great wedding to hookup a Icom IC-7700 to a Rohde&Schwarz HL451 Log-periodic. Let me tell you, it is! Last weekend we were building up the command center for the yearly Dutch balloon fox hunting and it happens to be there was a Icom IC-7700 lingering around. We decided to find out how the Rohde&Schwarz HL451 Log periodic would sound, so we hooked it up. I was listening to a USA-station in Michigan who sounds like we’re on telephone.
Tag: Antenna’s
BuddiPole test run
My birthday present of this year was getting a bit dusty. So after a days work this afternoon I decide to put it in the air for a test run. A few days ago I bought some nice mast pieces of 1m20 each. So I attached the BuddiPole to one of the mast pieces and build 6 of the pieces (the BuddiPole itself around 16 meters up in the air). It was kind of scary standing on the roof, holding the growing mast with two hands in the (little) wind. But it worked! I attached the temporary mast to my other 2m/70cm mast with some tie-wraps. There was virtually no wind, so not much could go wrong.
Back in the shack I did immediately notice the low noise level and strong signals. Of course it’s high altitude is also responsible for that (less QRM) but the SWR is flat on all of the 15 meter band! Thus it’s design and construction is quite nice. In less then an hour I worked 5 new DXCC-entities (countries) on 15 meter: Bahrain, China, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Cuba!
I think we can safely say the BuddiPole is working nice! Next time I’m putting it up in open field.
WSPR on 80m
Last night I leave WSPR on for the whole night to see what happen. According to propagation rules, the best opportunities on 80m should be around the greyline. In the evening that means in western Europe I should get signals out of the east and in the morning I should get signals out of the west. A little disappointed I was this morning when the only thing I saw is stations from Europe. Could it be my antenna? Bad propagation on 80m? Not enough WSPR-station on the air? I guess my S9 noise level on 80m don’t help much.