It’s getting cold

Posted by sm2wmv on November 3, 2008

Sorry for being a bit lazy with the updating lately. A lot have happened at the station during the last two weeks, which maybe explains the lack of updating. Last weekend we got the 4-SQ up and this weekend to managed to test it out for the first time. We ran 45 dx during Saturday evening, where most of them were JAs. SM3JLA worked two ZL long path and also a couple of KL7, which is a rare thing to do.

The QTH just keeps on making me happy and propagations on lowbands have been just amazing. We heard VE1ZJ 4.5 hours after our sunrise on 160M and he was still 539 on the beverage. We worked JAs on 80M during the middle of the day even though it’s 1.5 month until the band peaks when it comes to daytime openings. We also had a lot of fun working W6 long path during Sunday and during Sunday morning we heard a lot of US working SS and one of them was W6YI short path.

The 4-SQ seem to perform great. Usually we pretty much hear everything at such a quiet QTH but what has suprised me is that we work everything we hear as well so far. According to the S-meter on the TS-850 we have about 25-30dB F/B on the array, we wanted to get the array tuned in on 3650 to cover the whole band and we managed to do that. The first vertical was taken down this Saturday morning and tuned to match the other verticals in length and when we measured the array it was resonating around 3650, just as we wished.

On Sunday we also finsihed the base for the 160M vertical and assembled the tower sections plus the aluminium tube that will go on top of it. We will see when we can errect it, hopefully this weekend.

We have also spent a lot of time adding radials to the 4-SQ (mostly SM2LIY) and now the array has got about 60 radials under each vertical, some 1/4wl and some longer. SM2LIY also spent Sunday adding radials to the 160M vertical, which will also have more than 60 radials > 1/4wl radials.

Here are some pictures…