When you forget the BATTERY for your POTA activation!
Just like the title says, I forgot my battery, but I didn’t let that stop me from getting 51 calls in the log today.
The weather was also VERY hot and this truck has a not-so-great air conditioner, so I chose to setup in the shade and made this old pallet into my work station today.
Before you get all wound up over how close I am to the antenna, I was on the other side of the pallet from the base of the antenna and the power is turned down on my Scout to about 30 watts at this time. I ran the numbers through the ARRL exposure calculator and the minimum distance is 1.17’ away from the antenna on 20 meters and 1.5’ away for 17 meters. I was at least 6 feet from the antenna so I was 4 times the minimum recommended distance with this setup.
Back to the title. Today I had an errand to run before I could setup and get an activation. I had to travel to the other side of Chattanooga to pick up a computer for the shop office and then I could go “play” radio. Well, I load all the gear up in the truck and head out. I get almost half way to Office Depot and realize I had left the battery sitting at home next to the charger… To say that this deflated me would be an understatement. I was actually considering just going back home and calling it quits for the day. Then I saw the answer… Lowes…
So I set a limit on the expenditure of this “fix” to be less than 20 bucks or I would just go back home. Armed with this steadfast rule, I start wandering around the electrical isle in search of something that would allow me to power up the radio from the on board truck battery, without removing the Anderson power-poles from the radio power cord, and don’t forget, it has to be done for less than 20 dollars.
In the above photos you can see what I came away with. I bought a 25’ spool of 16ga two conductor lamp cord for 9$ (I also had bought some Sta-Kon connectors but I didn’t use them so I don’t count them in the project cost… The cord was just long enough to reach without being banjo string tight and I had enough ampacity in the wire to be able to run it and just get on the air. I started by attempting to connect it to the fuse block on the other side of the truck but as it turned out, all the external connections were switched and I wanted raw power from the battery… I know that I should have added a fuse where it connects to the battery, but this was “expedient” and not “Correct”…lol. Instead I just ran with it and had a good time. I was very careful about where I put the wire so it would not get cut or shorted out on the truck body, so I had good confidence this would be fine for a temp operation. It also gave me a spool of wire to make QRP power cords out of in the future so I can repurpose the wire after the activation too. I found that I could just shave a little off of the insulation on the conductors and they would fit into the power-pole sockets and had tension so they would not fall out. I also tied off both of the wires to prevent them from moving around during the activation too. This proved to be a very solid connection and worked just fine.
I also know that the grill screw I used for ground is under the plastic grill tab and not sheet metal, BUT the screw does bite into the metal front core support under it, so I knew the current would pass through the screw back to body ground and I was right, it worked fine for a temporary setup.
The station for the afternoon… I like setting up like this. Improvised stuff makes it more interesting to me. I did have to watch out for the pallet though as it did have some splinters here and there. The little Dell Inspiron computer has turned out to be the perfect logging computer with Linux on it. I use a distro called Open Mandriva and it works flawlessly with this machine. I mean, FLAWLESSLY. Like Dell built the computer with this distro in mind or something. I was having trouble with Linux Mint Xfce not wanting to “load the kernel” or what ever that means, but this distro performs flawlessly. So if you want to know more about it, I can make a video discussing it on the YouTube channel easily enough.
The next thing you will see if my replacement TenTec Scout 555 that I was able to procure from a wonderful HAM who just wanted to see it get some use. I am now working on a storage container for it, like a hard case or something. I liked the hard shell case from Harbor Freight, and I almost bought one of those today, but it was almost too big to be honest about it. The 4 latches were also a little bit of a hassle to me as well. So I am still looking at options for the permanent travel container for this radio. I also don’t have the full compliment of band modules yet either. I would like to get the rest of them so if you have band modules for the TenTec Scout 555, shoot me an email at wk4ds@hamradiotoday.org and let’s talk.
Since I only had one viable location to set the pallet to make a table out of it, I didn’t need a full length of coax either. What you see is the jumper I use to add band pass filters to my system when I am at Field Day or the like. It worked perfectly in this capacity and I also learned that my longer coax is acting as a counterpoise to the antenna when I use it as the impedance of the antenna was higher today with this coax and netted me a 1.5:1 SWR at the end of the coax. Normally with the 25’ coax in place the SWR is near perfect on 17 meter and 15 meters at the end of the coax. This tells me that the system is using the shield of the coax as a counterpoise and I need to look into that. Here you can also see that I don’t care too much though as I inserted the M.O.A.C.M.C or better known as the Mother Of All Common Mode Chokes into the line at the radio and just went with it.
The space weather for today said the bands would be dead, but I found 20 meters as well as 17 meters to be quite active today and I was able to put a whopping 51 QSOs in the log because of it! You read that right, FIFTY ONE calls went into the log on a day that the bands were dead in a little under an hour and a half! That is a good day for me. I would have stayed longer, but it was REALLY hot and I was sweating like mad just standing in the shade while working CW. I drank three bottles of water in an hour and a half and wanted more. It was that hot today.
I ended up running the earbuds again too. The traffic at this remote parking area is pretty heavy to be honest. I would have thought that on a Tuesday it would be lighter but there were tons of cars and it made it hard to hear the internal speaker on the radio. Plus the internal speaker in not as sensitive as the earbuds and I can hear much weaker stations like this over using the speaker. I am certain that a full 1/3 of the calls in my log are the result of just plugging these little guys into the front of the radio…at least 1/3…
You can tell how sensitive the earbuds are by looking at the AF knob on the radio. It is literally just turned up enough to hear. I cant be more than a few dB of gain from the sound being turned off. When I run the speaker, it is turned up close to half way to hear it properly when setup outside. I also just noticed that this radio really is in great shape for it’s age…
This is why I love Parks on the Air, the shack has such a great view. I love getting out with my radio more than operating in the shack to be honest. So much so, that I will operate in the rain if I have too… haha.
See you in the next one!
WK4DS
73