We had the good fortune to be able to talk back to the shack while at the Dayton Hamvention this year, with KD4GIE back in VA at the helm. In the photo below, N4NI, KD4ACG, KD4BPZ and KG4SNN work to get a station put together to make the contact.
The first evening, we discovered an issue with the antenna in the picture, the Buddipole that N4NI had just purchased that day. There was a short in his coax, and it has a special connector at the antenna end. A quick trip the next morning fixed that. In the meantime, we ended up using the buddipole tripod to slop a Par End Fedz 10/20/40 end fed antenna to a fence, and make our first contact with Doug on 40m PSK31. Easy at 5 watts with the FT-817.
The 2nd night with the buddipole all ready to go, we again made contact with Doug on 40 meters, but this time on SSB and CW. Doug was a solid 58 on 40m SSB, and even though we couldn’t tune the buddipole on 80 and 160 we could copy him. Copy was by far the easiest on PSK31, especially with the very seasonal QRN across an approximately 440 mile path using only 5 watts. It was the first time a couple of the folks had seen PSK31 in action, and we also made another QSO using this mode to Alabama. It was a good time to combine both QRP operation, along with field testing these antennas.
