Spent 45 minutes today calling CQ with 5 watts on 30 meters. Had nice QSOs with stations in Thunder Bay (he was running 4 watts), New Jersey, and Tennessee from my Dayton, Ohio area QTH. Fun. It's nice to see a sunspot. - Brady
Do it! The worst that can happen is you have fun. I worked Australia on 1 watt CW a couple weeks ago unexpectedly, so sometimes cool things happen! GL OM 73
Today I decided to have some fun with QRP. I picked my homemade radio PFR-5 with dipole on 10MHz and drove out of town. The forest was quiet, calm and beautiful. I made some QSO and photos. It was very faintly audible G4HSO/M, but we made contact anyway. I also took my old receiver to listen AM broadcast stations while I was packing.
I'm trying out a new MFJ-1820T antenna with my Yaesu FT-817nd. I bought the antenna for travel and quick SOTA deployments. I need more testing I suppose. I'm at my parents' house in eastern NC and have been picking up strong signals out of the UK, Europe, Panama, and Puerto Rico, but nobody seems to hear me. I can tune the antenna to a good SWR level and am using a 13' counterpoise attached to the radio's ground lug. Chris
I've found counterpoise to be the most influential part of my portable installation. More is better and having them fanned out like spokes. I took my MFJ antenna analyst with me last trip out. Very informative...
Are you sure that is due to the antenna? I experience the same thing on any antenna with my KX1, which seems to have an insanely good receiver. I'm guessing that the receiver picks up signals that are too far away to ever reach with the transmitter. At least not with the current state of the sun.
I never said it was the antenna, just that I was picking up these stations, but not being heard by them. Could have been a number of factors (not to mention my whopping 5w of output power). Chris
At first I just wanted to ride a motorcycle for a bit, but as always – I took a radio with me just in case… So today I drove 200 km to the Desna River. It was beautiful! Then I went to the Dnieper River. I drove ashore somewhere in between nowhere (QTH LOC KO51HA). I threw the wire over the pine tree and turned on the radio. No interference and weak signals are perfectly audible. I made QRP-QRP QSO with LA1KHA/P, UA1OJL/P and DL8LRZ/P on 10MHz, rested and returned home.
