XPost: rec.radio.amateur.moderated, rec.radio.amateur.equipment

PE4BAS Amateur Radio Weblog

///////////////////////////////////////////
Transmitting near water, a good combination

Posted: 05 Oct 2021 01:25 PM PDT https://pe4bas.blogspot.com/2021/10/transmitting-near-water-good-combination.html



Inspired by this blogpost and other blogposts from John MW1CFN I finally had a hour to spend at the coast. Trying to work DX with QRP powers which, following John's posts, can be boosted to QRO when you transmit near water.
You will never believe the difference till you experience it.

But at first I had a problem which previously didn't occur when testing
with the MLA. When installing the FT-817, plugged in the antenna and
switching it on I suffered from a S8 noise all over the 20m band. At first
I thought the heavy industry, lots of windturbines and hundreds of
solarpanels around the location finally caused HF radio pollution.
At first I thought about driving to another location, which is not as good
as this one but further away from the industry. Then it occured to me that
the noise could be transmitted from my new upconverter...
Yep, that's the grey box, the red one is my Li-ion battery. The advantage
of the upconverter is that it keeps an constant 13,8V on the transceiver
and so it will produce 5W power instead of 2,5W when the voltage drops to
10V.
I decided to unplug the upconverter and use the internal radio battery.
Noise was gone immidiatly. I hoped the upconverter would not have this high impact on receive, I didn't notice the extra noise with my MLA. But it is
an old saying between HAMs: You can't work what you don't receive, no
matter how much power you run! So, I had to try with about 2,5W...but with
an excellent receive.


Did I succeed? Watch the video and you will know...

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)