Tag: Antenna’s

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buddipoleA great birthday present this year: a BuddiPole! Always wanted a simple but flexible portable antenna for the outdoor activities. Until now I used a glass fiber fishing rod with 2 pieces of wire so I could work on 20m. But that is not a small package which you can drop in your rucksack easily.

The BuddiPole is a cool piece of hardware which you can build almost anything you (portable antenna-wise) would want. It’s usable for 40 to 2m. It’s possible to build a much smaller vertical BuddiStick with the components of a BuddiPole. An ideal solution for apartments or hotel stays where it almost impossible to setup a big (even portable) antenna.

On little side note: when you’re in the ordering process, consider what kind of base you going to add. You can choose the tripod or (in the BuddiStick-modus) the table clamb. Because when you don’t order a base(like I did) you have nothing to put the dipole on.

Now I really need to fix my Yaesu FT-817 so I can test my portable setup on a quiet place somewhere out there.

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PA1JIMLast weekend another edition of the Dutch PACC contest was active on the bands. Every year it is an exciting time around the second weekend of february. This year for me it extra exciting because as new contestmanager of clubstation PI4RCG. A few months ago I had the idea to build a simple multi-multi-station at our NERA club facility. Just 5 seats with a few wire antenna’s. It turn out to be much more work then I aspected. Continue reading →

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CQwwWPXLast weekend I participated in the CQ WW SSB 2010 contest at our clubstation. First timer for a 48 hour contest. While preparing I decided not to work the full 48 hours. Earlier this year I participated in the PACC-contest for 24 hours and I found that exhausting enough. So I did want to start on saterday morning around 5:00 UTC until 22:00 UTC and return on sunday around 6:00 UTC untill 16:00 UTC. That left sunday evening for breaking up the gear. Everything worked as planned, kind of… We were active from the clubstation with two hams. We had build up 2 seats and there where 4 antenna’s operationable. A 10-15-20 beam, a 80m dipole, a 40m dipole (which hung too low) and a 20m dipole (which hung waaay to low). We swapped seats every once in a while to use the beam for 15m and 20m. 15m and 20m where the bands this weekend. I was able to work a few really far calls and added 19 new DXCC-entities to my log. In total I worked 295 QSO’s. Not too much, but I blame it to the bad antenna conditions (at least for multiple operators).

We really need to get up more monoband dipoles and get them up high! Problem is there are enough high trees around our clubstation but almost none possibilities to climb them. I think we need to figure out how to get the antennas up. For the PACC next year we want to try a multi-multi-station for the first time. So that is gonna need some serious preparations!