My first CW Activation.
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- Опубликовано: 21 май 2024
- Today I activated Greenleaf Peak, W7W/LC-104 in Washington State. It was my first CW activation as well as my first SOTA activation using my vertical antenna. I was not impressed with the performance of the vertical and I noticed my signal got out a lot better with the End Fed Half Wave.
Congratulations on your first CW activation! 73
Thank you! 😊
Nice job executing the CW activation! Adding CW to your toolset as a portable op is a real force multiplier.
Thank You! I'm very excited about it!
I too have noticed that my Wolf River Coils 17' whip is not as good for NVIS (which makes sense) but had some thoroughly solid performance with it the entire second half of last year. I suspect the bad band conditions were not helping. It's another tool in the arsenal for sure. Hard to beat an end-fed as well. 🤷♂
The vertical works pretty well clamped to the roof of my car for POTA activations, but I think I'll just stick to the good ol' wire antenna for SOTA. The wire antenna is lighter and easier to carry in almost every configuration anyway.
I use my WRC for all of my pota activations where setup time is of the essence. I thought about using just the whip to save weight for SOTA, but all of my whip measurements include the coil so I have been too lazy to test another whip w/o the coil. With my whip marked it is easy to switch bands and be under 1.4 for all bands and usually < than 1.2. I could not tell if you were adjusting the height of your whip when attempting other bands. The band conditions were crazy that week. Congrats on your CW first…
Thanks! I was shortening it for 15 meters but otherwise I just leave it at 17 feet and let the tuner handle it. For 40 I usually base load it with the coil from my buddistick kit and then let the tuner make the match. I think for crowded and tight summits where space really is an issue, I'll probably be close enough to the car just to bring my FT-891 and blast out 100 watts of CW to ensure success. But yeah, with the band conditions being what they were, nothing was going to work particularly well.
Ah ok… I have never used a tuner with my whip as it’s resonate on the bands and I have each band marked so it is easy to change. Just activated a park… again nice video.
A ground mounted 1/4 wave vertical with 4 radials is often less than 50% efficient. Antennas shorter than that are even less efficient. Your ground resistance appears in series with your radiation resistance. As you shorten your antenna below 1/4 wave, your radiation resistance diminishes, making the situation worse. Getting the base of the antenna up, away from ground helps a lot, as does using an antenna with a higher feed point impedance, such as a 1/2 wave or something between 1/4 and 1/2 wave that your tuner can match.
Next time I'll probably try an elevated vertical with a single radial. As much as I hate it because setting it up is a stupid fiasco, I've had okay results with the Buddistick in the past.
Fantastic video! I like that antenna base, where’d that come from? Pretty nifty!
Thanks! You'd almost think I got that idea from someone else....
@@KD7QOW-np9gd and that someone else probably got it from someone else too, and so on and so on.. :) we stand on the shoulders of brave hobbits!
The incorrect antenna for the conditions and activity will always appear to suck.
Precisely. The title is intentional clickbait, but yes. This is the wrong antenna for the job.
QRP on a vertical with poor band conditions makes for an interesting compromise
Yeah, I'm really glad I brought my EFHW and didn't rely on the vertical. It was worth a try!
I love my EFHW.
I think the dipole is top bench mark for portable any other wiz antenna is below that. DB over a dipole. Keep the kx2.
I’ve had great results with a linked dipole in the past, but the EFHW is so much easier to deploy! And you can pry the KX2 from my cold, dead hands. 😀
You know the old saying: verticals radiate equally badly in all directions... hi hi....
Ha! There are some other tricks I need to try before giving up on verticals completely. I'm going to try elevating it with a single counterpoise. I also need to experiment with a choke at the feedpoint to see if that helps define the antenna better.
@@KD7QOW-np9gd When I've used verticals in the past, just getting them up as high as you can really helps. If you can get it up high enough, so the counterpoise is a 1/4 wavelength long at your freq, just let it dangle straight down and you basically just have a vertical dipole. And that will give good performance too.
I wouldn't get hung up on the idea that a low horizontal antenna is NVIS. Next time you go out you might find the vertical performs better. I'm not a fan of vertical antennas, but I've been around long enough to know there not 1 "best antenna" for every situation out there.
Whether it's actually NVIS I'm benefitting from is definitely debatable. I've also talked across the country on 40 meters with the wire antenna. What I have observed is that most of the time I have much better luck on 40 meters with a full half wave antenna, regardless of where or how it's mounted.
@@KD7QOW-np9gd and that makes sense about 40 meters. Most people don't know vertical antennas suffer greatly on 30/40/80/160M when trees, houses, pretty much anything that will get in the way whilst in the Fresnel zone. It's so easy to for the assembling waves to get absorbed because the vertical radiates from near the ground. Higher is definitely better when it comes to the lower bands and you have a bunch of stuff in the way. (They don't call it a ground plane for nothing) If you are in the middle of a field the vertical antenna will perform better than in the middle of a forest for example. Still half the fun is testing, and hope you drag more antennas up mountains to do more testing :) Cheers.
Nice job on the activation. Boo for the clickbait title.
Thanks! The need for clickbait is an unfortunate reality of this medium. It's no fun to put all the work into editing a video only to see it stagnate at 50 views because the algorithm didn't like it. I'm at least trying to keep the content relevant and hoping most viewers can see through the clickbait.