Tim

In regard to HF rigs there is also something else new. I finally purchased an Icom IC703+ and have a few weeks to learn how to use the new radio. I took a trip to the local ham store to buy a new power supply. Taking into account my two meter SSB rig I plan to buy the Astron 12 amp supply with meters. It is on order one as they did not have one with meters in stock. Until I receive it I can’t practice with the new radio though. I need to buy a battery so that I can operate class 1B. So now I need to go back to all those articles I ignored for the last few years and figure out what size and type will work best for operating and keep rather portable.

By the way, I think that I am going to start participating in VHF/UHF contests as well. Unfortunately I will only have a 5 watt hand held, a Kenwood TH-F6A, another recent purchase, for the upcoming 12 June event. I may still see if I can make some contacts though.

Tim

I was so happy to see fifteen meters open this year. The solar flux had been at a disappointing sixty-seven all week so the expectation of any activity above twenty meters was not high. After the first few minutes of sitting in front of the radio and listening to twenty meters I decided to see if anyone was on fifteen. It took forty-one contacts over an hour and a half before the band weakened and it was time to try elsewhere. Even then I only worked one twenty meter contact before moving down to forty for most of the rest of the evening. There were a few contacts made on fifteen, twenty and eighty meters before I called it a night. Sunday morning I worked most of a page of twenty meter stations and then finished with twenty-nine contacts on fifteen. All one-hundred-and-twenty-one contacts, in 47 sections, were SSB with five watts, QRP. My attempt at CW was limited to the last hour of my contesting with no results.

After the contest I wanted to compare last year’s results. I was amazed at how few contacts were made last year. I thought, “What was I doing all that time?” What was different? Last year after five CW contacts I made 46 contacts, thirty-six sections total, mostly on twenty meters. Maybe it was just me getting back into the swing of things after a ten year break? Perhaps it was the two additional antennas that helped?

After putting up the tent I aimed my slingshot at the two trees used last year for the same G5RV from last year. The ends were a bit higher but the feed point was still at forty feet. I wanted to add a fifteen meter antenna just in case the band opened up so I put together a fifteen meter folded dipole. The antenna and feed line being both made with ladder line used a plastic handle from an old printer box to hold the center firmly together. It worked very well, but I should have bought some of the nice centers that Ten-Tec has when I was over there last year. I wanted this antenna as high as possible so I aimed at the single tallest tree in the center back of the yard. After three tries my last shot did not hit the tree and went through at about sixty-five feet making the center of the fifteen meter antenna at almost sixty feet. I also had an eighty meter dipole fed by ladder line. I sacrificed it’s height by stringing it at the end of the fifteen meter antenna and letting it slope down to a tree a hundred feet away. The center of the eighty meter dipole was about 25 feet up. If there had been time and more string the far end would have been up in a tree. Due to the addition of the fifteen meter antenna the feed line came out short for the eighty and I had to feed it with what I could find at the time. I used RG-6 out to a four-to-one current balun. I had some really nice RG-8 available, but it had N-connectors and I had no adapters and no time to do anything about it.

You can see that most of this was all put together last minute Saturday morning, but that does go along with the spirit of the event. I got on the air at two-thirty local time. Also in the spirit of a true emergency I had purchased a solar panel earlier this year. I pulled out the deep-cycle battery I used last year and started it on the solar panel Friday afternoon. The battery is retired from UPS use and is probably six years old now. It will be replaced before next year’s FD, but it did fairly well helped by the low power drain of the Argonaut 515. I ran without the dial light except for picture taking and never saw higher than 0.18 amps on receive.

-with dial light on-

I used a charge controller and watched the current and voltage with one of the great little in-line monitors from Powerwerx. I had seen one on a You Tube video and then finally spotted it in an ad in QST. It was pretty cool to be working contacts and watch the voltage on the battery rise when there was good sunshine on the panel. I will also get an extension cable for the solar panel for next year. It would have been in the direct sun light quite a bit more if I had ten feet more line. The lowest voltage I saw Saturday night was 12.7 volts. The next morning when I started the voltage was back over 13 volts, cool! That should be the fifteen meter antenna in the reflection of the solar panel in the picture below.

It was ninety-six degrees Saturday and if there had not been shade on the tent I would have been a 1E station instead of 1B. Thanks to the trees and our location, not too far from the edge of the hills as they head down into Nashville, there would have been no breeze either. You don’t have to go to far north to lose that nice breeze.

Over all it was a great Field Day. I found that my five watts could pretty much work anyone I could hear. I only really had problems sometimes when the station I was trying to work had a huge pile-up of people waiting to make a contact. I did leave the fifteen meter antenna up just in case I want to see how it works this weekend. I am looking forward to next year.

Tim

I have always been a Ten-Tec fan. My first radio was the 509. Unfortunately I sold it when we learned we were moving to Alaska and purchased a Kenwood TS-140S. Even in Alaska though I made the ALC modification and ran the radio at 5 watts output as best I could. I sold the TS-140 last year as having a full power radio was just not as much fun as having a true QRP radio.

So what is available in the QRP radio department? I am leaving out kits as I just am not interested in building anything at this time. There are really only two radios that one can walk into a store and buy today and be on the air with tonight. One is the Yaesu FT817ND and the other the Icom 703 Plus. As part of my plan to buy an Argonaut I did check out the competition to see what was available last year. Although the Yaesu had some advantages I believe the Icom had the better specifications. Receiver sensitivity was one thing that caught my attention.

Sorry, but I have never really liked Yaesu. The display on the 817 is a bit small. I was going to complain about it covering so many different bands, but I guess that is pretty common now. The only Icom radio I have ever owned was my very first 2 meter rig, the Icom 22S. That radio did influence my DC power cabling. Every radio I own gets the same type of power connector on it as the IC-22s. I can plug any radio in anywhere car or home. Buying one of these radios though almost seems wrong since I like Ten-Tec so much.

So what do I do? I am not really wanting to buy a second hand rig. I should mention that I miss 30 meters. I like CW, but my code skill requires that I keep a microphone around for the rare contest.

It would have been cool if Ten-Tec had built the 516 into the same or very similar case as the 515. Probably the only thing I felt was a negative for the 516 was the case. It was not quite right for mobile or portable use, but a bit too small to comfortably use as a regular home desk top radio.

Tim

I really did like it though and intended to replace it when the time was right. I decided that I would let the new Netbook market mature a bit before buying another. I even waited to see what Dell was going to offer. I like Dell as both computers at my feet are Dells. The new one is pretty much just for work and World of Warcraft while the older model is for everything else like what I am typing now.

I thought that perhaps prices might drop, but I was surprised at how much. That first eee cost $499. Remember, they all had seven inch screens back then with the eight gigabyte model having one gigabyte of RAM. Now that same computer sells for about $270. For $20 less than I paid for the first one I purchased a ten inch screen, one gigabyte of RAM and a forty gigabyte solid state drive. It also has the 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor rather than the older 900 MHz processor.

I still bought the same Pearl White exterior and Linux. I do intend to give Ubuntu eee a try. I guess the next step is to decide how I want to go about installing additional operating systems. So I need to decide whether to buy an external CD/DVD drive or try the USB drive approach. I might to take a spare copy of XP and put it on a USB stick for those times when I need to access something with work, but that is a pretty low priority as I do have a company laptop for that purpose.

So what triggered this buy? I had really wanted to wait a bit longer before buying another computer, after all I think I want a Ukulele. I bought my daughter a Bushman BU7CM Jenny Concert ukulele with matte finish and it is really nice. Probably my most used device when not at home is my old Dell X30 PDA. Sometime go to the Dell website and price the stylus for that device. I broke mine recently and now that the pins on the bottom are bent I am having a very hard time plugging it in to charge it. Basically I see the writing on the wall.

I needed something that could do everything a PDA could do, spreadsheet, notes and audio player, but really did not want to spend $300 on a similar device that represents six to ten year old technology. I also wanted to get away from Windows Mobile and move on to the greener pastures of Linux. The Asus eee PC while a bit larger fits this task well.

Tim

In desperation I removed the primary drive cable and retried the installation. It was a successful install. Ubuntu actually runs very nicely on the computer. However I purchased it with the wrong video card so my plans to use it are on hold until I purchase a new card. It was very strange however. As long as the XP drive is connected to the system the Linux side will not work. Has Microsoft done something to more recent editions of their OS to make it less friendly? (Following added 17 May 09) We have since found out that changing the hard drive type in the bios fixes the problems with installing Ubuntu or Linux Mint on this machine. Set it for raid. The Windows side may not work after this change however. Dell now has a bios fix that takes care of the problem. Update your bios!

So it is currently my plan to use the machine exclusively with Ubuntu once I obtain a new video card. My mistake was to buy a video card that does not have good Linux support. World of Warcraft runs on this older Dell 2400, but is rough as the card is a regular type NVidia PCI card. There is no PCI Express or AGP slot on this 2400. Compiz works well on both machines, but WOW will not run on the 8600 GT with Linux drivers in the Inspiron 530.

By the way, the 8600 GT appears to be a better card than what one can get in a twenty inch iMac. Thus another reason for my reluctance to switch. Apple needs to consider better video support for all of their machines including the Mini. There is no reason why even a Macbook can not have a decent video card. I think that this could become more of an issue in the future and Apple should have already been a leader in this area especially when you consider how many people use Apple computers. I work in television and all of our production equipment is centered around the G5 or MacPro.

One last comment that is somewhat Mac related. I have a ten year old Dell at my desk at work just for convenience to look up information on line. I have had Ubuntu on it for the last two years. If it had not been for Linux the machine would have been deleted from the inventory. Today I installed gOS 3.0 on it. If you are familiar with it you know how OS X-like it is. I am going to see if it will run a bit better with gOS as the distribution is supposed to be a little more lean. Gutsy Gibbon has been a bit slow and I should have left it with 7.04 installed. (Following added 17 May 09) It was interesting, but Xubuntu ended up being the last OS on the machine before it was finally retired.

Tim

Just about a week ago my Dell laptop developed a bios problem and the current Linux kernel would not boot. A previous kernel worked fine. So I ended up deleting the partition and reloading Ubuntu Linux for the first time in two years. I copied all my files off to a USB drive in the time it took me to go eat a piece of cake, I was in Memphis for work at the time. The next morning I loaded the current version of Ubuntu before work. When I arrived at work I took a moment to load several of the programs I regularly use such as Bluefish, FileZilla, Thunderbird, VLC, Tunapie and WINE. I also did all of the updates. That evening in the hotel I finished setting up everything else just as it all had been before. I even installed a couple of Bible programs using WINE.

The amazing thing is that I have only been using Linux for two years and all of the above was absolutely painless and went so nicely I guess I enjoyed it. When was the last time anyone enjoyed reinstalling an OS? Sounds strange to me too, but it was just so easy! Oh, and I never once used the terminal or command line.

By the way, I should mention that after my last post I only lasted two weeks on Windows XP. I just could not take all the nagging and “issues” of Windows. So I tried installing my copy of Bible Works 5 using WINE on this computer. It installed flawlessly. So cheated and got PC Study Bible 2 working as well. It is not perfect and it would not install so I copied the folder from my old Windows install and created a shortcut. It works well enough to use as I need it. Also e-Sword works fine. QuickVerse 4 is the only one that would not install. The problem is probably something simple, but I don’t need it. So I am happy to avoid Windows still and do not have to think about the money of switching to Mac, at least not till the next upgrade of the iMac.

Tim

When most people buy a computer it usually comes pre-loaded with some form of Microsoft Windows. When most people want a Linux computer they load it onto an existing computer that they own. So some people think that Windows is easy and Linux is hard to load and use. Actually when it comes to taking an unused computer and loading Windows or Linux, Windows will be the more troublesome to load.

One tends to forget unless you do it fairly often. Windows, many times, needs motherboard drivers, network card drivers, video card drivers, sound card drivers and sometimes a few others. Linux, in my experience, for the most part just loads and runs. I know some have had to get wireless cards working. Windows comes with almost no applications while Linux comes with almost any that one would need except for one major item.

Personally I think that if you could go to the store and buy a computer with a choice of operating system pre-loaded one would find the basic operation to be fine. This is because the manufacturer would have taken care of all the peculiar needs of the hardware. The Linux computer would run longer and better due to problems with viruses and maintenance on Windows. Thanks to Dell for beginning to make this happen.

Now on to the one major missing application for the Linux OS. I try to do a fair amount of Bible study. On the Linux platform there is GnomeSword from the Sword Project and the CrossWire Bible Society. In the past there was E-Sword. All of these are nice attempts, but not adequate for real Bible study. They work for casual reading and perhaps a Strong’s word lookup here or there. I did find an error in the GnomeSword Strong’s Concordance.

So now to the point of where this is leading. I almost can not believe I am seriously thinking about doing this. I have several nice study programs on Windows and in fact am typing this now on the dark side, as I hear it referred to, rather than on Ubuntu Linux. My son has been pushing me to buy an iMac. The money will be tight for a while if I do this and an Argonaut V will be put off for a good while. I had even thought of getting an Icom IC-703+ having decided against the Yaesu FT-817ND. For now though I either have to stay on Windows, which is really unacceptable, or move to the Mac.

I think radio is a lot more fun than computers overall. Although World of Warcraft seems to take a lot of my time. Well if I do buy a Mac I will have plenty to complain about here as there is plenty to complain about on OS X and the Mac.

Tim

Added 23 July, See this article on Linux vs Vista.

Saturday morning I set up the tent and strung the G5RV. Almost did not think it would fit between the selected trees, but it did with maybe 20 feet to spare. I purchased a small 4 foot portable table that had adjustable height. I worked perfectly with a standard lawn chair. I did charge the deep cycle cell Saturday morning for maybe a half hour. It did not really need it though. The lights mentioned in the previous post were hung and one would have thought I had a 40 watt florescent bulb they were so bright. The keyer and tuner were hooked up. I ran three counterpoise lines. Next year I will take more time to check the lengths, but one each ran west, north and east. Then I realized that FD did not start at noon central, but rather one so I had an hour to wait!

I always forget just how fast the CW stations go. I did manage to get enough from 5 contacts to count them. After that I was glad I had a microphone. I worked 46 SSB contacts on 80, 40 and 20 meters and 36 sections including Hawaii. I did hear an Alaska station with a signal strength of S7, but did not work him.

The G5RV was wide banded on 20 and was nice not to have to continually tune up.The orientation favored the southwest and northeast. Next year I would like to have a little more signal going to the northwest. Next year I think I will add one for 40. If the band conditions are finally getting good by then I will definitely enjoy working 15 meters.

Also, I had a nice night of restful sleep. There are three pictures of the set up at http://www.ke4ke.org/

Tim

There are a lot of things one would need. I got out a screen tent, full top and all screen sides. In case of rain I do have a regular tent. I made sure that all the parts were there. I discovered the tent stakes were missing. After finding those I put up the tent. Then I considered lighting. I found that with a couple of large safety pins I could hang a string across the operating position. The string can hold some nice LED lights we found at the store. I hung two from Wal-Mart on either side in the middle of the tent for general lighting. The ones over the operating position though are from K-Mart. Their version of this flat five and a half inch circle of twenty LED’s is brighter, whiter light, and has three extra bulbs in the middle. Both lights run on four AA batteries and cost about the same as an LED replacement bulb for a standard flashlight. I think we are going to buy a number of these.

My original plan was to have three antennas. I miscalculated at some point and only ordered enough wire for a G5RV. Also right now the sling-shot has gone missing so hopefully it will turn up soon. I did put up a long wire made with zip cord to test how well it would hang.There is over two hundred feet hanging right now between trees and the sag is really a bit too much for the antenna to work properly. There is quite a bit of string at the far end and I think that maybe I should try for a 40 meter version instead of 80 meters. Glad I gave it a try and wonder if it will still be hanging in the morning.

The G5RV is cut and ready. I have 300 feet of ladder line coming in the morning. There is more than needed, but the plan is for the tent to be in the shade. That means that it won’t be right under the center of the antennas. I have no clue just how much feed line will be needed at this point. More wire will be needed if the third antenna, a collinear for twenty meters is to be put up.

I like a nice operating table and plan to pick up one that can change it’s height and fold up. I think I have seen some like that. How often is the ground perfectly flat where you set your table?

Tomorrow I will make sure that I have wire and fuses for the main station battery. There was no time this year to work on alternative power.

Hopefully by this time Saturday I will have made several pages of CW contacts with the Argonaut 515. Perhaps next year there will be a 516 ready for the contest. Unfortunately there is rain scheduled for the entire 24 hours.

Tim