First, Winter Field Day. The last full weekend in January. I had planned to go afield for WFD last year, then something – I don’t remember what – came up and sort of put the kibosh on that. I haven’t done any planning for it yet, even though it’s now Jan 11. There’s so much else going on around here right now that, frankly, I’d almost forgotten about it until someone inspired me to blog about my Ham Radio plans for this year. Perhaps I’ll simply operate from the back yard shed, where I already have the FT-891A mounted under the workbench, hooked up to a deep-cycle battery. And use emergency power. And use the for-operating-elsewhere laptop.
Second, POTA. I’ve hunted a fair bit, but have never activated. But I now believe I have all the bits-n-bobs necessary to go operate HF (and VHF/UHF) someplace else, without disassembling any of my home station (though I might bring the DX Commander vertical anyway, since that’s not a big pain to move once in a while).
Third, more CW. I already do a fair bit of CW for contests and POTA hunting, but that’s the easiest sort of CW to do. With few exceptions, all the other CW operators for these things are sending perfect, computer-generated Morse Code. Ergo, as long as the signal is pretty good, fldigi does most of the decoding (and all of the sending). But I’ve started knocking the ol’ rust off my former ability to send and copy without computer help. I want to improve that simply because I want to, as a personal challenge, not because I believe it’s important. It’s not. It’s anachronistic to the extreme.
Fourth, more antenna experimentation. I’m likely to buy another DX Commander just for throwing up a reflector behind the one I have now, to get more gain NW to Europe. Or sometimes South to really pound my signal into Texas.
I also have an idea for a Fan Dipole that does less compromising on height above ground. I’ve searched a little, and haven’t (yet) found anyone who has done the following.
The idea is that by feeding it with Window Line, I could have the 6m dipole at 3m – a half-wavelength (the ideal height) above ground. A 10m dipole taps at 5m above ground. A 12m dipole taps at 6m above ground. A 15m dipole taps at 7.5m above ground. Yadda yadda. No, I don’t have the wherewithal to get anything 20m AGL, but I can reach 15m, which is perfect for the 30m band. So the 30m, 40m, 60m, and 80m dipoles will all be tapped at the top, in the traditional Fan Dipole way.
I’ll need a 9:1 (or maybe even 8:1 if I can source or build it) BalUn at the base to get the feedpoint impedance something close to 50 ohms.
I wonder if it will work.
I also intend to resume my experiments around getting a workable 160m loaded vertical that’s only 52 feet (or so) high.
