Well, the month has started out busy for me at work with lots of changes happening there, but I have still managed to get focused and operate a bit. I’ve only been active on 20 meters so far, as I’ve been away for a few nights in a row. The propagation report hasn’t been the greatest either, with the solar flux at 71, K index at 2 and A index at a whopping 22. Surprisingly, conditions weren’t too bad and I have the chance to make my first few QRP contacts of the month. I ran the rig at full power yesterday to start off the month (all 5 watts).
started out with J79XBI in Dominica (1814 miles) on SSB. Seth has been in the Caribbean for quite some time now, and will soon be back at home as SM0XBI. He gave me a solid 5×5, and he was as usual booming in here. He was running a couple hundred watts into a yagi looking this direction. The next contact was EC5RN (4054 miles) again on SSB, with a similar signal report at 5×4. He actually had quite a pile up of guying calling him, so I just had to be patient and wait for the smoke to clear. I had one more SSB contact from KP3A (1455 miles) who gave me a 4×4, but said I improved during the QSO. He also actually dropped his power from a few hundred watts down to 5 watts, and I was still able to copy him!
After working hard for those contacts, I decided I’d go over to PSK and see what I could get into. Made three very easy contacts – W7WBI in Arizona (1968 miles) along with W0LMD in Colorado (1510 miles), followed by the best QSO of the day with S51ZZ at a distance of 4486 miles! He gave me a solid 599 report. I can say that contacts on PSK31 were almost effortless – and certainly as easy as my usual setup with the Icom and the desktop PC.
The antenna tuner has been doing a great job. I’ve tried a mix of the G5RV and the 20 meter antenna with it, and it has tuned both quite well and fast. So whats next? Well, I’ll continue to make as many QRP contacts as I can. As you can see, I’ve been running the FT-817 and the LDG auto tuner off of a small 5 amp power supply. My gel cell that I ordered just arrived today, so I’ll get it charged up and run everything off of that, and eventually take to the field it everything. It is a powerport 73 from www.powerportstore.com – so I can plug other stuff up to 8-10amps in at the same time. I’ve also got to refine my PSK setup a little bit – the 817 throws a little bit more audio at the laptop than it should, and I’m not about to hook it all up to the desktop.
Am I having fun? Well, some of the QSOs were work – but I can see the appeal and think I would most likely want to do more QRP while out operating portable stations. Keep watching for more details.
