I brought my FT-817 out to a friends cabin and tried 50.525 for a while. Could not get the SWR down to a reasonable value, and had intermittent strong QRN for some reason. At least I tried, and soothed my nerves with a nice glass of Pinot Blanc. We had a nice visit and will give it a try again in the near future. And Field Day / June VHF are on the horizon. Thanks to everyone who abandoned digital for some phone ops. There is a glimmer of life after all on the "magic band".
One of the problems I had was getting the 817 to go to 50.525. Even though I set the FM tuning step to 5 khz, it only wanted to tune in 10 khz jumps. I fooled it by going to SSB mode and set the frequency, then switched mode to FM. Anyone else have that issue ?
Greenside Cafe has struggled lately, they're closed at the moment, not sure if they're going to re-open. Here's a few photos of the antenna (a Moonraker 12-074) on the Rago Fabrication 3/8x24 tailgate mount, and the view from the observation platform of Sandia Crest at 10,600 ft. elevation. The operating position was the upper parking lot just below the summit. Rig was an Icom IC-7100 running about 50 watts to the antenna, which is Moonraker's max power rating for that antenna for continuous-duty modes like FM.
I thought about that when I came up with the idea but didn't want to complicate it. Personally, I had one of my son's birthday parties that afternoon, so I went out in the morning. I figured if there was too specific of a time, it'd give people an excuse/reason not to try.
Those are the "scenic" photos from the observation deck. Looking along the ridge, you see it's a bit different, there's the forest of antennas for the City of Albuquerque TV and radio stations, and the parking lot that served as the operating location. It's not a good spot for VHF skip weak-signal work (say, a June VHF Contest) as the amount of RF up there desensitizes your radio's front end. But for a casual FM activity day, it's fine.
Yeah, it’s a good antenna and surprisingly robust. That being said, I got completely skunked. I heard the one station on ssb on 50.130 but by the time I got ready to call he had gone QRT. Would love to see this as an annual event, though.
Too bad about the Greenside, it was a good place. Last time I was there was 2014 or 2016 when I was traveling through ABQ. Thanks for the pix from the Crest---a neat place to spend an afternoon, eh? 73, Jeff (ex-NH7RO/W5 ABQ resident 2012-3 and ex-SWL SFE resident 1980-89)
52.525 is the FM simplex calling frequency, and was chosen since yesterday was 5/25/'25---so you were a couple of megs short at 50.525---but maybe next year we can all try again (even though the date will be 5/25/26)
We should still have a few years before we're out of capture effect range for the people on the calling frequency!
