Monthly Archives: October 2011 - Page 2

Top section finished

Posted by sm2wmv on October 17, 2011 Comments Off

Last weekend we found that the cats were back at the QTH living in my barn. The kitten was now a bit older but still as shy as before. I didn’t really manage getting to hold him and SM3JLA was bitten by him in the finger when he was trying to figure out if a human hand was eatable or not. Since he hasn’t really had any interaction with humans this was of course understandable. Anyhow by Monday when I was going to go home I got to touch him a bit and I laid down one of my sweaters making a bed for them when I left. Our plan was to bring them back home with us this weekend when the girlfriend was going to come down too with the car. However I put a neck-less on the mother with a message and my phone number in case that she actually belong somewhere.

Just as we turned onto the gravel road leading to the QTH the phone called and a girl asked if it was us who had put the neck-less on their cat. So we talked a bit and it showed to be the neighbor further down the road (1.5km or so). So I explained everything and they knew that she had gotten kittens but they never found them. When we arrived at the QTH the kitten was running fast to me and was very eager to interact which was funny since the sweater “trick” seemed to have worked. The owners were happy to see the little kitten and picked him up on Saturday evening.

This weekend I spent some time doing the awful job of finishing the isolation work up in the attic, but now its finally done and the roof has gotten an extra 24cm of isolation which should keep the heating costs down during the winter months.

After that was done I started work on the top section for the WARC tower. It will have an alfa spid rotor in it and I did the mounting brackets for both the rotor itself and the bearing at the top of the tower. The pipe is a 60mm galvanized steel pipe and will hold a brand new 5el CUE DEE monobander for 20m this winter. I will rebuild the driven element of this beam to hairpin as on all other beams before we put it up, but I will not optimize the design anything this year but wait until it goes up in the 40m tower instead. Hopefully we can get the tower up next weekend but I doubt we can get it all running before CQWW SSB, but we will try.

[Show as slideshow]

60m tower finished and SAC SSB

Posted by sm2wmv on October 9, 2011 Comments Off

This weekend was meant to be a work weekend, but after we got the 40m stack box up the tower and got delayed about 1.5 hours we worked rest of the contest. Now I hope we have time to get the 18m tower with the 5el for 20m up before the snow but it will be close. Its no disaster if this does not happen, but it would make us a lot more flexible.

                    Scandinavian Activity Contest, SSB

Call: SJ2W
Operator(s): SM2LIY SM2WMV SM3JLA
Station: SJ2W

Class: M/S HP
QTH: Da Traesk
Operating Time (hrs): 22

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
   80:  122    30
   40:  285    53
   20: 1047    73
   15:  519    61
   10:  166    34
-------------------
Total: 2139   251  Total Score = 1,380,500

Club: Worldwide Young Contesters

Comments:

Going into this contest we did not plan anything serious. Last weekend we
managed to get two new antennas up and Saturday morning was spent with SM2WMV 3-4
hours up in the tower getting stuff in order. When this was done some more time
was spent getting the cabling finished on the ground and we lost the first 1.5
hours of the contest. So we guess that probably 250 qsos was lost during this
period. However we managed to beat last years score.

It was fun to see 10m alive the way it was. We heard W6 on 10m at 01:30z which
must be many years since it was possible. We also had great night time openings
towards US on 15 and 20m. However there was some aurora which can clearly be
seen looking at our rate sheet. Best hour was in the middle of the night on 20m
when the aurora finally released its grip of the polar path.

80m was painful and also 40m was down compared to last year. The mult count on
80m is just ridiculous but we tried, many times and still could not get
anything going at all. Thanks to K3ZO though for calling in as the only US
station. As M/S we aren't able to do DUAL CQ either which otherwise is a good
help during those slow hours. 

Since we didn't plan anything serious, we didn't really have a real mult
station. We hooked up a radio barefoot but we didn't move much mults, since we
were not going to be serious anyway.

Next one will be M/S in CQWW SSB, so look for us then! 

Check out the website, it contains lots of information about the progress of
the contest station. You can also find the equipment etc there.

http://www.sj2w.se/contest/

73 de the SJ2W gang.

SJ2W
All bands - All modes
QSOs (with dupes) - By time

| Hr |          |
-----------------
| 13 |       97 |
| 14 |      142 |
| 15 |      164 |
| 16 |      158 |
| 17 |      123 |
| 18 |      112 |
| 19 |      119 |
| 20 |      131 |
| 21 |       68 |
| 22 |       77 |
| 23 |       23 |
| 00 |       44 |
| 01 |       87 |
| 02 |      170 |
| 03 |       86 |
| 04 |       50 |
| 05 |       28 |
| 06 |       47 |
| 07 |       67 |
| 08 |       87 |
| 09 |       84 |
| 10 |       88 |
| 11 |      127 |
-----------------
|    |     2179 |

SJ2W - Continents
All bands - SSB
QSOs (with dupes)

|   EU   |   NA   |   SA   |   AF   |   AS   |   OC   |
-------------------------------------------------------
|  42.7% |  40.5% |   2.1% |   0.4% |  12.6% |   1.7% |
-------------------------------------------------------

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Finished up the stackbox for the 40 stack

Posted by sm2wmv on October 6, 2011 Comments Off

Yesterday I had some time over at work, so I spent an hour mounting the 40m stackbox into a weatherproofed box which will be mounted between the top and lower Yagi in the 60m tower. The box contains a few W2W Russian vacuum relay and allows us to switch between both in phase and out of phase. With no voltage to the box the Top Yagi only is connected (because of the relays just being SPST) but through the L-match, so SWR will be a bit bad. The L match converts the 25 ohms we get when connecting the Yagis in parallel to the 50 ohms we wish to have to the radio. The capacitors are Russian doorknob 220pF capacitors. When I measured the box I pretty much a perfect match and about 3.04dB insertion loss measuring on one port, which means the insertion loss is 0.04dB to each antenna which is very little.

The thing left to do is to make a mount so that we can attach U-clamps to it which are attached to the tower legs. This will hopefully be done on Friday or Saturday morning, so we can get the box up the tower on Saturday or Sunday.

No real effort in SAC SSB this year, we don’t have the time for it. The tower work will probably take quite some time and after that we will start finishing up the 18m tower which we want to get up before the snow arrives, which can be any day now.

Here is the old picture gallery from when I built the box. Ignore the measurement values since those have been greatly improved now with a bit of tuning. I have a feeling too that the network analyzer during those pictures were not calibrated, because it seem to be a bit too much insertion loss.

[Show as slideshow]

40m stack completed

Posted by sm2wmv on October 4, 2011 Comments Off

Since the weather prediction was so good this weekend, except Sunday I decided to stay extra long at the QTH. Me and SM2LIY made the 40m beam ready to be lifted and we tuned it on Sunday, during quite windy weather but still not too windy to just lift the antenna for tuning. We hoisted it to about 20m above the ground during our measurements and after three attempts we had the beam VSWR dip where we wanted it. After that we attached mast to boom plates and made it all ready to be lifted.

SM3JLA showed up just over the day on Monday to help us. Also SM2XJP showed up as usual and helped us up with the beam. It all went very smoothly except I had to wrestle the beam in the tower since I remembered the width between the tower legs of being 400mm and not 450mm. This meant I had to move the driven element about 3cm so fit the boom/mast brackets and slide the boom inside the mast/boom plates since I had already attached one to the tower. But after 2.5h I was able to climb down again.

Next weekend if the weather allows, we will try to get the phase box up there to connect the stack so we can try it out. The phase box handles BIP/BOP and has an L-match matching the two 50 ohm antennas to 50 ohms. I have been thinking about making a new box in the future, which enables us to be able to just use UPPER/LOWER or BOTH, mainly just because I would like to be able to see the difference, not that I think it will be very useful.

However, according to HFTA and thanks to the statistic files N6BV sent me of SJ2W, the stack looks like it will be a real performer! Just check the HFTA plots of the 40m stack below and tell yourself. I have plotted the single beam at 60m, the stack and the stack out of phase.