Field Day Around the Corner

I realized I haven't posted a pic of the new IC-7000 since I added it to the shack. Sorry about that. Here you go.



I know I've said it before but I'm really digging the SignaLink and 7000 paired together. Unfortunately there's been a lot going on and I haven't been able to spend much time on the air lately. I'll have to make up for it this weekend.

Ok, so on to the preps for this weekend. Earlier this year, the family of Donald C. Clifford, K8JZK (SK), donated their father's radio equipment to ARES to give the Jr ARES members a kickstart. As a way of saying "Thank you!" to the Clifford family, the TS-520S they donated will be our Get On The Air station. We thought it was fitting to use it to help introduce people to the world of amateur radio.

The radio has been off the air for about 7 years so we're treating it gently. I've currently got it running off a variac to bring it back to life slowly and hopefully avoid blowing any capacitors or other components. She's been going fine all day and I've got her up to 60V. We'll let her cook overnight and then bump up to 80V first thing in the morning. I figure that by this time tomorrow she'll be up to full power. Here she is. Beauty, ain't she?

Field Day Preps & Other Stuff

We've finally gotten our Field Day location set in stone for 2009 and it's looking to make for a wonderful event. My church has graciously allowed us to use their Marshside campus. It's 24 beautifully wooded acres with plenty of camping area and gorgeous trees.

At the next ARES meeting we're hoping to have a couple of new antenna projects to work on for Field Day. So far the high vote getters are a 3/4" hardline antenna for 40M and a Moxon antenna at 20M or higher (due to size). I'm really excited about what Field Day has in store for us this year.

My General upgrade course continues to progress. This past weekend we covered the exciting topic of Rules & Regulations along with a little math refresher and some formulas. This week we'll be diving into simple circuits, resistors, inductors, and capacitors. I've got a couple of breadboards so hopefully seeing the circuits for real will help solidify the concepts.

We had a walk-in visitor for the last class and she seems to be very interested in amateur radio. Hopefully she'll be back on Saturday.

HF Update

I have to say that I've been having a ball since getting the new 7000 and ditching the RigBlaster. I'm knocking out DX contacts on PSK31 left and right. In just about a month spending only an hour or so at a time and operating sporadically throughout the week I've already racked up about 25 DXCC contacts. I highly recommend this setup.

This past weekend marked the first day of the General upgrade course I'm teaching for one of our local clubs. We had one couple traveling but I believe everybody else on the roster made it. We even had some that weren't on the list show up. Nobody fell asleep, walked out, or threw anything at me so I consider it a good class. :-) Next week probably won't be too exciting. Rules & regulations with a math review. Yuck. Oh well, I'll do my best to make it interesting. At the least I have some tips to share that will hopefully help them remember things like the band plan come test time.

Tomorrow I should know more about our Field Day location. Who would've thought we'd have such a hard time finding someplace to operate? I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my church will allow us to use our property. We have 22 acres of beautiful, wooded property that doesn't see much use. The trees are tall and spread out where we'd be operating and I think we could really get some great contacts with our antennas so high. The staff meets tomorrow so hopefully I'll know something by lunch.

Some of us did helped with the Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure. It's a 100K/100M bike ride. It took us through some parts of the local area I'd certainly never been through. It was an interesting experience but we definitely have some communications issues we need to work out with the ADA staff if we do this again next year.

I guess that's about it for now so I'll say 73. See you on the bands!

Long Overdue Update

Well, I guess it's been long enough since my last entry that I can post again. About six months ago I started having receive issues with my 718 and I haven't been on HF much. A few weeks ago the family took a trip down to Lakeland (near Tampa) and on the way back I decided to stop at AES in Orlando. I left with a used IC-7000.

I really like the size and feature set of the 7000. It makes it a great base station that can go mobile if necessary. It works great with my existing LDG Z-11 Pro tuner and I've been having a great time being back on the air.

When I got the 7000 it was time to try the digital modes again. Unfortunately my RigBlaster Plug & Play seems to be a piece of crap. I've had problems before and they reared their head again. I called WMR and got a bunch of attitude from Ed who seemed more set on making me feel like a moron rather than helping me get the unit working. With no help from Ed but assistance from the Ham Radio Deluxe forum I got the stuff working. I even had a ham from OK call me on his own to make sure I'd gotten it working. I can't say the same for WMR.

Once I got the Plug & Pray working again I started having fun. I've made DX contacts in Russia, Cuba, Canada, St. Croix, Germany, Mexico, and others. I also got to try out Olivia which I've been wanting to do. Unfortunately the POS P&P quit working again. I refuse to call WMR and decided instead to throw it in the junk box. I now (as of yesterday) own a Tigertronics SignaLink USB. It was a breeze to setup and I was on the air again without any trouble.

I also finally got my tri-band dipole about 10' higher. I don't know that it'll help much but I've made more DX contacts since I did it. Higher's better, right?

In addition to raising the dipole, I replaced the Hustler vertical with a simple random wire. I have it running through the trees and ending at a push-up mast keeping it at about 25-30'. I also had to replace my DIY copper j-pole so I now have a Diamond X200A on the chimney. I got great signal reports on 5W simplex so I'm quite happy with it.

Starting in June (the 6th to be exact) I'll be venturing into the instructor role. I've agreed to teach a General upgrade course for our local club. I'm looking forward to it. I think we have about 7 students signed up right now. It'll run through Aug 15 (skipping Field Day and Independence Day) with a test session on the 22nd. Hopefully we'll have 7 new Generals come August.

Today we scoped out our Field Day site. We ran into difficulty getting a city park. We couldn't get permission to put anything in the trees as we've done in the past and we couldn't use push-up masts because we couldn't have any guy lines. We found a state park willing to work with us and met with one of the Rangers today. We'll be at Little Talbot Island State Park though more specifically the Ft. George River inlet parking. It'll be the first time that we'll have a location where can actually camp and operate the full 24-hour period. It'll provide some unique operating and setup challenges but that's the beauty of Field Day.

This Field Day should be pretty good. We have some equipment that was donated by the family of a SK to help our Jr. ARES members. That's going to be used as our GOTA station. We also have other counties (including one in GA) that plan on visiting us to see what we're doing in Duval County. I'm really looking forward to it. Hopefully my students will take the opportunity to get on HF.

Well, that about sums up what's been going on. I'll try to be better about making updates.

Fay...The Aftermath

Well, we staffed the shelters for the third day yesterday. I was busy as the Acting Emergency Coordinator so I didn't spend a lot of time trying to jot stuff down for the blog. Friday was definitely the worst for us as the storm headed west right on top of us. It dumped a lot of rain and we had some really crazy flooding. I don't know why people insist on driving through heavily flooded areas. There were several cars completely covered by water.

We did pretty good as an ARES group. The Red Cross kept us hopping as they would close shelters and not necessarily tell us. We started with 10 shelters and dropped to 7. Out of those we kept 5 staffed with radio operators almost for the duration. In all honesty, though, I'm disappointed that out of over 80 members it was the same handful of folks staffing for all three days. Nobody offered to provide relief. On Wed and Thur we had 40 and 38 net check-ins respectively. Out of that many people you would think somebody would be willing to step up and lend a hand so someone else could have a break.

We also lost some operators due to their own issues at home, work, etc. I'm very proud to say that we even had a non-ham friend of one of our operators take her place when she had to leave. He just monitored the radio she left behind and would get on the phone to make his reports to the EOC.

I had two great net controllers operating from the EOC. All of the radio operators did a fine and professional job. I was proud of everyone.

I'll post some pics from our neighborhood and our own backyard when I get them off the camera. I did have a large limb come down from the pine tree that hit the feedline to my dipole. I think it's still connected but I haven't checked it out yet. I also lost one small piece from my Hustler vertical.

This is the weather over and around Jacksonville at 10:34 Friday.



This is a few hours later at 2:44.



I guess we fared ok. I did learn some things for the next activation, though. I need to have a dedicated go bag/box to hold all of my ham gear. It takes too much time gathering everything up and packing it. I need duplicates of things that I would use for home and emergencies so I don't have to take things from home and try to get them back after the event is over. For example, I need FRS radios that are only used for activations instead of the ones I use around the house. The same for coax, test equipment, battery chargers, phone chargers, etc. I spent too much time grabbing things from the house, from the truck, from here, from there.

Hopefully I'll have time before the next activation comes. We'll see. There was already another storm brewing on the heels of Fay.

Emergency Configuration

I decided it would be prudent to test my emergency antenna setup in the event that I lose the dual-band off the chimney due to high winds. The more I use it the more I'm in love with the EE-3 antenna from Evans Engineering. This thing is so simple and it works like an absolute dream.

Here's an image of my dual-purpose radio. It's configured as a go-box but is also used as my home installation. If the need arises I simply unplug the coax, put the lid on, and run out the door. I'm using a Yaesu FT-8800 with a 10AH 12V battery and MFJ ClearTone speaker. I rigged it with a switch so I can disable the speaker if I'm in a busy environment and just want to use phones. The phone jack is always enabled so I can use phones if I need to hear and cut the background noise but those around me also want to hear what's being passed.



You can see I've got the antenna sitting atop about a 2 1/2' piece of schedule 40 PVC. I cut a notch in the bottom to allow the cable to come out and the pipe can sit flush. I'm using my trusty ol' wood clamp to hold it in place. SWR is down at 1.2 and I can't ask for better than that. I did a radio check with the EOC and was full-quieting through the repeater but didn't make it even on 50W simplex. I guess I'll have to run the long cable outside if the antenna comes down.

TS Fay

After long last there's finally been some activity on the radio front. We're facing Tropical Storm Fay now and the Red Cross opened ten shelters yesterday.

It was a crazy day for me. I had received a report from a former Assistant Emergency Coordinator telling me that the antenna at one of our shelters had a high SWR. I talked to the Assistant Principal (our shelters are mostly schools) and she said they'd done some roof work and she couldn't see the antenna anymore. Well, I braved the rain and drove all the way across town only to read a 1.8. However, the operator that actually staffed the shelter got worse and worse. It turns out they moved the antenna and I'm figuring they didn't weather seal it as it changed the more it rained. I guess I'll have to get on the roof when this passes.

I finally made it to my own shelter about 2pm. I was pleased to see a 1.3. I was pretty much like a chicken with it's head cut off the whole day. The RC decided to staff 5 shelters with radio operators earlier than anticipated so I was left trying to find bodies. I still hadn't heard back from anyone from my previous email to get ready. It sure was crazy. I had the EOC on one freq, RC on another, admin contacts on another, and my phone all keeping me busy. Of course I was also dealing with the folks at the shelter.

I was quite happy when the RC decided to secure comms and sent all the operators home. It was nice to be in my own bed. :-D So today I'm just listening to the net waiting to see if they decide they need our assistance. We'll see. Maybe I'll have more info later. Stay safe!