Dead Bands ehhh…
Today was odd… Strange weather causing strange bands getting a strange logbook contact count.
So today finds me at park US-2169…again…but this time I have a challenge in front of me. Activate in spite of terrible band conditions. Normally a report like the one below is bad news for someone activating a park, not for me though as I am not one to do things like…your know…check to see if the bands are terrible because of a CME or something. Armed with this lack of knowledge or simply throwing caution to the wind, I loaded up the Ten Tec Scout and the HF Signals sBitx and headed to the park.
I went to my usual location and setup the telescoping whip and started with the Scout on 20 meters and SSB to play with a microphone that I had recently replaced the cable on. I wanted to see if all of it worked properly and if there was decent band conditions, I thought I might even setup and work some SSB, but as it turned out the bands were stacked full and I was barely getting into the other stations so after making like 3 contacts in the manner, I dialed down to the CW area and started looking around.
The weather report looming like it was and the bands being as bad as the report said it would be, voice modes less than 100 watts were spotty at best. Knowing what I know about the different modes after using them for over 2 decades, the simpler the mode the better it works. SSB is harder to make contact with then CW and Cw is harder to make contact with than FT8. I will routinely make contacts on 15 meters with FT8 and the CW signals just a few kilocylces away are almost impossible to hear due to atmospheric noise and fading. Another example is in this blog post where I went to CW from SSB where people were struggling to hear me on SSB, but wait till you see what happened on CW…
The antenna was the Wolf River Coils 213” telescoping whip antenna and the two 17’ ground radials I made for the hamsticks. These radials make an incredible difference in how this antenna tunes for the band from 20 to 10 meters. I recently made a YouTube video about it and is linked here. I like how I can tune this antenna in a variety of ways to get the most out of it for my POTA activations. Also, if you will notice, there is no transformer for this setup, that is because I have tested it at the antenna connector and the the impedance difference is almost none. Yes, there will be a difference between reading the end of the coax and the feed-point on the antenna as the coax will dope the results, but the antenna is pretty close as it is so the losses here are minimal. It is so little that I have put off the idea of making a transformer to correct it all together. You see, the impedance of the antenna can be adjusted with this setup by changing the angle of the radials relevant to the radiator. This is all covered in depth in the ARRL antenna handbook and is probably all over the internet and YouTube as well.
,The TenTec Scout 555 is an odd little HF transceiver. It has these band modules that are interchangeable so the radio is actually a monobander, but can be user configured to all but the 60 meter band by simply changing the module. The reason there is not 60 meter option is that this radio had ended production before that band was added to the amateur bands so there was never a band module for this band ever. An enterprising experimenter could build one if they wanted as Ten Tec in their infinite wisdom, shows the schematics to the band modules they offered in detail. You can build band modules from these prints. So it could be logically deducted on what values would be needed to work on 60 meters, at least in one of the slots, unless you added a rotary switch to select the different frequencies or something like that. I love that about the old company too. They wanted you inside the radios, they felt it was important for the amateur to be in there and experimenting on things.
All that aside, now we have the actual activation. Which went really well to be honest. I made a total of 70 contacts on this day. I even got a few on SSB! I figured I would try to setup a SSB operation for a little while, but to be honest, the bands just were not cooperating and since no one could hear me…apparently…I decided to go hunting. I worked 3 stations like this and all three gave me really weak signal reports. To be honest, these stations were fading in and out heavily too so I could see why no one could hear me. Once I was finished struggling around on SSB, I decided to give CW a shot…this is where things really changed.
I found a clear frequency, which is a lot easier for me to do than on SSB…, and started calling CQ. It didnt take long to build a small pileup and to start working people from all over. I was kinda surprised to be honest that when the band would fade out and then when it would come back, there was an amazing amount of distance I could hear. Stations that would normally not be heard, would come in clearly for two minutes. After two minutes though, they were gone. But then other stations would come in! It was strange… I worked 55 loggable contacts while working CW and had a great time with the sun wreaking havoc on the sky!
After a great run on CW, I decided to setup on FT8 and work some there too. I was able to get 12 more in the log like this in a short time! Now to be fair, FT8 is made for conditions like these as it is a great weak signal mode. As you can see in the photo above I was still on version 4.4 at this point, I like version 4.4 alot as it solved the CW keying issue but still allowed the full power output of the original V2 system code. The version 5.0 that I recently installed has throttled the power output down pretty significantly (probably to protect the radio from damage), but now I dont get near the output that I was getting on 80 meters with version 4.4, but I digress. This might be able to be corrected in the setup files like I did with the original power calibration…I have not tried yet. Also if note, you can see the home brew “spinner” I added to the VFO knob. This was an idea I heard someone say online and so I tried it. Turns out that it works great. Simply grind down a washer to sit offset on the knob. Deburr it and sand all the edges smooth, then hot glue it to the VFO knob. Done. Works like a champ too and only cost 15 cents…
This is what I like about activating during the week here. I have the place to myself and it is like therapy for my mind to be all alone here and just have the radio to listen to. It is so peaceful. I hope this inspires you to get out and setup your radio somewhere for fun! Thank you for coming along and 73.
WK4DS