One of the things I have begun to expieriment with lately is using RG6 coax for HF radio.  Where I installed my new 5BTV antenna I had already buried 8 RG6 lines for a previous Dish Network dish.  Rather than pull this coax out and rerun RG8x I figured I would give it a shot, as the loss is quite negligible at the HF frequencies.

I wasn’t sure if the impedance mismatch would cause issues, but my tuner was able to bring it up without issue.  I have been using this for quite some time now without any complaints.  The tuner brings it to 1.5:1 on the radio side quite nicely and my signal gets out good. Continue reading →

Well the new 5BTV antenna arrived on Thursday, and after much work and fiddling I have it installed.  The results are, mixed, at best.

First of all, my original idea to ground to the fence is out.  There is too much noise carried on the fence, and it doesn’t seem to add any ground at all, just noise.  So, if I’m going to be using this antenna long term I’m going to be installing ground radials.

Secondly, the noise floor isn’t that much lower than I expected.  Here is a QSO I recorded of CJ6POP out of Canada.  As you can see the background noise on 20M is about an S6:

Continue reading →

Driving across town this morning I noticed something interesting; a “local” FM radio station was being overpowered by a country station (never managed to catch enough to get a call, but possibly from central IL) .

Because of the way the radio spectrum works, ducting (carrying VHF radio signals long distances in the atmosphere before returning them to earth) starts at lower frequencies and works it way up. Continue reading →

Well it’s been a long summer already.  This spring, a strong windstorm came through and knocked down my OCF Windom dipole antenna, an antenna that I had been having marginal success operating worldwide with.  I’d made several DX contacts, but the issue was the placement of the antenna, it went directly over the house and picked up about a solid S6-S7 of RFI simply by being that close to all the electronics in a home.  Suffice it to say I got lots of good signal reports of S9 but routinely would need to have a station repeat their call several times during contests. Continue reading →