Just back from Bowen and then straight off into the Pacific Northwest DX Convention this weekend. I’ll do a full write up about my experience lugging the shack across Howe Sound plus I’ll step back a few weeks and give a brief overview of my effort in the IARU contest earlier this month.
In the meantime I’ve been playing around with some of the great images I shot on Bowen for use in a possible QSL card, whaddaya think?
I will be active on Bowen Island (NA-091) from 24-30 July using my home call, VA7DXC. I’ll focus most of my operating time during the RSGB IOTA contest but will hope to be on air regularly throughout the week with a focus on the WARC bands. During the contest I will be SSB only on 40 thru 15 but will also do some PSK afterwards too.
Bowen Island NA-091 (© Adam Jones)
Bowen Island is about 45 minutes from downtown Vancouver and is often incorrectly grouped with the more popular Gulf Islands. Bowen is part of the British Columbia Province South group, a chain which extends all the way up the Georgia Straight. Though there a number of resident hams on Bowen I thought it would be fun to combine a bit of dxing and contesting in a lower noise environment. As usual I’ll have fun trying out some new antenna configurations and of course downing a few cold ones!
Antennas will be wires only, supported on my recently purchased 12m Spiderpole. Space permitting I will have a fullsize dipole on 40m which I will then change into a 1 element quad for the higher bands. Rig will be my IC-7000 with the AH-4 coupler.
I’ll be entering the IOTA contest as a low power island entry which luckily enough restricts the antennas to 1 element per band i.e. dipole, vertical, quad. As an island entry contacting me will be worth a plummy 15 points plus a possible mult!
Hope to see you on the air!
Thanks to Barrie VE7HBS’s recent presentation to the NSARC HF group, my interest in WSPR has been re-ignited. I used WSPR briefly when first setting up my shack a few months back, basically to see if my signal was getting out.
Now that the summer months are here I might begin to play around with it a bit more as means to test out some new loop configurations. With automatic transmission, WSPR would seem to be the optimum program to not only check propagation but also antenna properties and characteristics.
Well I somehow managed to wangle a few days off work this week so I decided to tidy up the shack and antenna installation.
Paid a trip to a store here in east Vancouver that sells everything made from bamboo. They have a huge selection of bamboo poles in various widths and lengths from 6ft to 10ft and for the measly sum of $5.86 grabbed a half dozen 1/2″ x 6′ poles. The plan was to replace the ugly PVC poles I use for my balcony loop with something ‘prettier’ and a bit more stealthy.
I also dropped by Burnaby Radio and picked up some nice flex-weave antenna wire and a few other odds and ends. The chunky ugly speaker wire that usually forms my loop was about to go SK.
Within an hour or so, I had setup the poles and a new loop configuration. This configuration with the vertical sections folded back on themselves presented a slightly higher (though still tunable) SWR than normal but not by much. However not to worry as the new flex-weave wire is so much easier to handle that I decided to just try another new configuration. The goal of these new configurations is to present as much wire as possible to the open front of the balcony. Previous versions had the loop folding around inside the balcony but the more wire out and away from the building the better.
Though not scientifically conclusive by any means I ‘felt’ my latest configuration, with the loop criss-crossing at the front of the balcony, provides a better S/N ratio and more ‘get-out-ability’. I followed up the installation with a few PSK31 Qs on 20m with reports from two Asiatic Russian stations reporting a 559 and a 557. Not too shabby considering conditions on the band have been generally quite poor for the past few days.
So it has been a very long while since I have posted here and there is much to talk about.
Unfortunately work commitments have curtailed much of my air time this winter and spring, however it has been developments abroad that have kept me on the air.
As an Irish citizen holding a Canadian callsign I cannot unfortunately apply for a CEPT certificate in Canada. Those are only available to Canadian citizens.
So to be able to operate in Europe and Ireland I must contact each jurisdiction I would like to operate in. My plan was to operate in Ireland on my trip home to family over the Christmas period, so I contacted ComReg in Ireland to apply for a temporary (12 month) visitor callsign.
The usual scenario is for a temporary callsign to be issued but because I was an Irish citizen and was able to provide a permanent station address in Ireland (parent’s family home) ComReg informed me that if my qualifications checked out with Industry Canada that they would be more than happy to issue a life-time Irish callsign.
After a couple of weeks waiting ComReg issued EI8GNB.
Now with callsign in hand I needed to assemble my travelling station. Along with my IC7000, AH-4 and Acer netbook I also purchased a Gamma Research HPS-1a power supply. This little puppy puts out enough power for 100W SSB and about 35 to 40w in PSK/RTTY and it’s no bigger than a small paperback book, perfect for travelling. The whole station fitted into a nice Lowe Pro Classified 200 AW camera bag that I would use as my airline carry-on. I placed a length of coax, feedline and antenna-wire in my checked suitcase.
Shack in a Bag : (clockwise from top left) Icom AH-4, Icom IC-7000, Gamma Research HPS-1a, headset/mic etc.
Travelling during the holiday period is troublesome at best but I was also worried about all this electronic gear I was carrying. I found however that if I unpacked the major components into separate scanning trays that airport security never had a problem with the stuff.
I would put the AH-4 and rig in a tray on their own for scanning like you would with a laptop and I rarely had a problem. However I do advise to carry about a photocopy of a manual page for any suspect objects. The AH-4 did draw the eye of security screeners a couple of times but with manual in hand and a little explanation things were smoothed over instantly. Funnily enough the ‘suspicious’ level seemed to be higher in European airports rather than in the Canadian and US airports I passed through.
Once in my parents home, time to setup the antenna. They have a standard square shaped backyard that provided about 1500sq ft. Hmmmm, simple dipole anyone? I cut some of my antenna wire into a simple dipole just over 34ft in overall length, with a run of 10ft of 450 ohm feedline in the middle down to the AH-4. I also made sure it was off-resonace, the AH-4 does not like high impedance resonant antennas. I strung the antenna from a upper floor bedroom to the permanent workshop building on the other side of the garden and offset it away from each wall with insulators and a length of plastic cable. Height above ground varied from about 20 to 10ft enough for the upper bands but probably creating a general upward omnidirectional pattern on the lower bands.
The AH-4 had no problem tuning the antenna on every band except 160m!
Over the course of two weeks I made dozens of PSK contacts all over Europe working about 30 countries including the US & Canada. The bands seem so much more alive in Europe than they do in the Pacific Northwest and there always seems to be somebody calling CQ, so there is never a shortage of QSOs.
I also managed a couple SSB QSOs as well, the highlight was working Gunther VA3GA on 17m. Conditions were poor for that QSO with lots of QSB, late in the day in Ireland, but with 100W on that simple dipole all the pertinent information was exchanged easily.
The ARRL RTTY Round-Up was also on over the holiday period and I made over 80 contacts again including the US, Canada and highlight making P49X in Aruba! Not bad for a wire antenna and 40w.
Holiday 'shack' setup with my Acer Netbook. Running RTTY with N1MM during the 2010 ARRL RTTY RU.
Now that I know I can pack up the station into one bag I’m looking for many more opportunities to do holiday style DX operating, I can’t wait for the summer to come.
