Going HF

 

A lot has happened in the past couple of weeks.

My trapped centre fed dipole arrived and was installed in the ceiling (only place I can fit it). It as expected, picks up a lot of noise. 

40m trapped dipole - Aussie Built

 

I ordered a Xiegu G90, and it was shipped “express” from China, but due to hold ups in Singapore, spent more time in transit than the CE19 I ordered from the same seller and was shipped via snail mail.

It took a week to hear a single voice on the G90, and even then it was on 80m from a local net and I could barely hear it. The antenna is just not cutting it. 

I did connect it up to a PC and start playing with FT8. On 40m I was able to start picking up interstate activity within an hour or two. Eventually, I started seeing activity from Georgia, New Zealand, India and Sweden. Clearly not a complete right off.

 

The Xiegu G90 head sitting on a custom mount - aka a block of timber cut at 45 degrees and painted. A little bluetak on the bottom for stability.

I had ignored 80m given that the WSJT-X waterfall was angry red – until it dawned on me to use the inbuilt attenuator, then drop the gain. Success. So far a whole lot of one way activity within the state – VK3. I hadn’t seen VK3 traffic on 40m.

I ordered a 80-6 end fed vertical – Sigma SE X80 from the UK. Should be here next week. It’s 6m high. Local restrictions are 8m.

I built a “bucket” mast yesterday – essentially a 2.4m pole in a 20L bucket full of concrete. Levelled it up, put a bracket on the wall to keep it stable, and it’s ready for the antenna. As long as I mount at 2m I should be fine. Handy height for disconnection during electrical storms, and for dropping it down if it gets too windy. 

BucketMast-1000: Adds the weight, just needs the wall anchor to keep it in place. Final revision involves a full bucket. It was just easier to carry it out half full then finish off.

 

When my length of RG-213 gets here, I’ll be able to cable it up. It’s as close to the “shack” as I can get.. literally outside the window, so the cable run should be pretty short. Can’t wait to see how this antenna goes.

I’ve barely touched the dual band this week past week. In the week before it, I was eagerly tuning to see if I could pickup any traffic from AO91/92. A little, occasionally but it’s pretty garbled. I’ve been suspecting I loose quite a bit from the 15m+ of RG58 running to that discone, so hopefully I can rectify this soon.

In other news, I sat my Foundation exam on Wednesday night, so now the waiting begins.

It’s a good time, having already enough gear to work with, within the limitations of the foundation license to start looking at where the inefficiencies are and trying to address those. Poking around various mailing lists and forums – particularly for the G90, there are a lot of rookies complaining about lack of contacts and power, who don’t seem to address a lot of the really simple stuff that the experienced hams point out – making sure that the antenna and everything in between is good, sorting out the interference issues, and all that stuff that is mentioned in the basic training material.

For me, I know that RG58 isn’t my friend beyond short patch runs, so that needs to be rectified. I know that I have a stack of interference, so that needs to be addressed (should that ferrite ever get here..), and I know that my dipole isn’t really effective where it is, so I need to try something different (ie. the vertical). A quick look at the SDR over the HF bands makes it really clear that there is a lot of noise here. I won’t be able to get rid of it all, but I should be able to get rid of some of it.

That gets me really to the important point where foundation level licenses are often power limited; if we can’t nail down all of the “simple” stuff (that really isn’t that simple), then we really aren’t ready for running high power. If we haven’t put in the effort to sort out sources of interference, then how are are prepared to deal with the potential interference we cause to neighbours when we crank up the watts? Are we really doing the job right if we have so much inefficiency in our setup that only 1/4 of our power makes it out of the antenna?

I see the point, and I see it more as I read other peoples struggles where they have really missed all of the basic “troubleshooting” techniques in their own station because they think their new toys should “just work”.

I know what my own frustration was like, with my new toy, that received nothing but static for days until I discovered FT8. It’d be easy to think that it should “just work”, but I know, because I researched and checked, that I quite simply do not have everything needed in order. This is why we limited to 10 watts. If we can’t make this work, then perhaps the problem is on the other side of the transceiver.