The ACOM 2000A that we got from Ojojoj Music AB has arrived. I haven’t been this happy about a package since I was a little kid. However SM2LIY has been assigned to the Swedish “national team” in the SAC contest this weekend so he will be running the contest without the amplifier since he was assigned to the low power category, since we did not know the amplifier would arrive in time. But I will sure play around with it before and after the contest. Now I will start putting the remote together for real as well, and we’ve gotten sponsored by SM2O and his Microbit company as well with their remoterig products that will be the core of our remote operation.

Again thanks to Ojojoj Music AB!

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As the followers of this blog know, we’ve been having lots of problems lately with the amplifiers at SJ2W. Lucky enough there are very kind people in this world and we have gotten a brand new ACOM 2000A sponsored by Ojojoj Music AB. We are extremely happy about this since the amplifier is very robust, fully automatic and will also be of great use for us when remote controlling the station.

Even though probably many think that the SJ2W station is a station built with a large budget that is not the case. Most of the stuff at the station are surplus gathered by different members and most of the money put into the station comes from my salary with a few exceptions from time to time, for example the last aluminum order. This means that such a contribution made by Ojojoj Music AB has got a great impact on us! Now I feel highly motivated again and lots of stuff is planned to be done before the snow comes. So stay tuned!

The work on the house is almost done for this year. Left to do is some painting but then it will have to wait until next year before we do the last side of the house. Now it will be all radio from now on this year! I am still hoping that we might get the 40m tower up, it would be a huge help if we just had it up even if not rotatable, so we could fix a yagi for 20 and 40m towards east. That would make us a lot more flexible, so that will be the goal for this autumn.

For the weekend of 8-9th of September we’ve planned to take down a 60m tower which is located up north outside of Gällivare. It is a tower which was put up in 1985, so its 10 years older than my 60m tower and built by OH8QD. It seem to be in very good shape and if weather allows, we might have it down on Sunday the 9th of September. SG3P (SK3W) is coming up to help along with SM2NOG, SM3JLA and SM2XJP.

If this goes well we will know what our big project for next year will be…

SM2LIY was also joining us at the QTH last weekend and spent some time in the forest putting up 500m of RG-6 to a vertical which will be used for inband listening. We did some early tries with his IC-7400 as receiver and it seem to work quite well. However I think it would work even better with a radio which has got better IMD performance (maybe a good roofing filter), so I will make some tests with the MKV as RX and compare. Plans are to add a new radio to the shack in the future, and it will probably either be another MKV or a TS590. The preamp seem to work well, but I’ve got some idea of maybe making another type and use just to compare, but we will see…

Hopefully our major amplifier problem has also been solved, but I’ll get back to that in a future post when things are final.

Pictures were taken by SM2XLL

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