Time is 02:14 local time when I write this. Have been working a lot of DX today, about 80 NA worked and about 10 JAs on 80M, most of them during the day. I hope propagations hold up tomorrow too.

SM2XJP and SM2XLL came over while I was putting up shelves in the shack and they helped me out. I think the result is pretty nice, even though it’s a lot still left to do. Beside each monitor the antenna switch controller will be located (openASC) which will control pretty much everything at the station. The radios will probably vary a bit since it’s not many of them that are left at the QTH outside contests. The computer that is located by one monitor will be moved behind the fake wall later. It’s the current router and will also be the computer which controls the two radios that will be used for remote (two IC-7400). I am also building a set of digital power meters which will be used at each operating position. They have remote pickups that will be located in the basement in the amplifier room so that we don’t need to put cables into the shack that are not needed.

We have gotten about 60cm of snow here and I had to shovel a lot of snow and considering that it was 0 degrees made it worse. I had to go out and remove snow from the guy supports for the 80m verticals and I also hit the verticals and a lot of snow fell off them. Here are some pictures…

The roof over the door for the antenna switch room looks tired

The house covered in snow

Looking down where the 160M vert is lying, need to remove the snow from it

More snow in SM2 winter “daylight”

Center post of the 4-SQ

This is the half square for 30M, it seem to be a bit too low right now.

More to come…

Last weekend we continued to work on the 160m antenna. SM2LIY joined me during the whole weekend and was trying to finish up the groundplane for the antenna, we still need to put out maybe 1km more, but that is done rather fast. We also put out the feeder for the antenna (RG-17) and it ended up being approx 170m long but at these frequency it’s no problem.

We’ll see if we can get it up this weekend or if we need to push it forward even more. I plan to operate SB 80M during CQWW CW but we will see if I will be assisted or not and how serious my effort will be. I think that will be decided a bit depending on the propagations.

Here are some pictures

Base of the 160m vertical

Base of the vertical with the actual vertical attached

The first 24m consist of WIBE 280mm tower sections

Some of the radials

Isolator of the bottom plate

To be continued…

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…

SM2LIY and SM2WMV were burning more of the branches from cutting down all the trees

Sunset picture of the 4-SQ

The 4-SQ during daylight. You can also see SM2LIY + SM2NOG on the picture

SM2NOG preparing the 160M base

SM2WMV made some isolators out of Nylon for the 160M vertical

Before we had all four verticals up we did a capacitor with RG-213 so we could get the antenna working on SSB for the CQWW contest.

SM2LIY working DX during CQWW SSB

More pictures of this last weekend will arrive soon…

This weekend we managed to get the 4-SQ up. Here is a picture which shows it. Left to do is to add a lot of radials and also in the future take down the first vertical we put up to shorten it one meter.

Picture of the array during the sunset just after it was put up.

More pictures to come…