Radio Diversions

I've been under the weather for the past week or so.  I believe it was a combination of lack of sleep, over-exertion and severe allergies.  When my allergies are bad I stay at home indoors.  That means I have time to, among other things, play with my radios.

I've been playing a lot lately with the rig shown here.  It's an experiment in how small and how cheap you can put together a rig that actually works.  It takes me back to my childhood when I spent countless hours rigging long range receivers out of discarded broadcast radios, salvaged parts and hookup wire antennas.  

The transceiver (center) is a Chinese knockoff of a legendary German design, the QCX.  It is built for three bands only but those are the three most commonly used by most hams and they are compatible harmonics meaning a single antenna with a little tuning can work all three.  It is a 5 watt radio.  That is by definition low power or "QRP" in ham talk.  

The antenna tuner (left) is a Chinese knockoff of a legendary American design, the Emtech "Z-Match."  It is ideal for low power operation due to its high efficiency and minimal insertion loss. 

The battery (center front) is 12 volt 9 amp hour LiPo that I received free through the Amazon product tester program.  It will power the radio for a long weekend without a recharge.

The roll of wire (left rear) is 66.5 feet of high quality silicon coated copper strand.  66.5 feet is one half wave of 40 meters, a full wave of 20 meters and a wave and half on 15 meters.  It is matched to the tuner and radio by a homemade 49:1 balun (matching transformer).   This is a home brew reverse engineering of the famous old MFJ 1984LP design.

The radio, tuner and antenna are the same circuits as their more expensive predecessors just in different packaging. 

 Working low power is different from regular ham operation.  You have to work at it and operator skills are required.  You can't just key the mic and talk.  On our last little mountain top adventure I managed to talk to nine states including Southern Florida and Northern California.  But, I got reports that my audio was less than perfect and I felt I should have made more contacts.

I brought the rig home, fiddled with it some and decided that I have much better radios that will fit this application.  I should just use one.  So, I repacked my radio travel kit with a fairly expensive little jewel of Japanese craftsmanship, my beloved old Yaesu FT 818 and forgot about it.

But this week as I had time to think about it, I realized that I had been looking at my little bargain basement rig the wrong way.  The QCX design started life as an ultralight CW (Continuous Wave Morse Code) rig and was stellar in that application.  The single sideband voice was achieved by diddling the software.  Since I am a lousy CW operator, I hadn't even tried the little rig in CW mode.

Today was a lousy day on the ham bands.  The big kilowatt stations that run nationwide service and emergency networks were struggling to make contacts.  A combination of atmospherics, sunspots and unexplained variations in the earth's magnetic field have played havoc with HF (High Frequency) communication recently.  But, I figured what have I got to lose.  So, I pulled the little Chinese knockoff out, hooked it up to my best antenna and programmed it to automatically send out a Morse Code signal which would be picked up by monitor stations around the world.  I hoped I might be heard in Kansas City or Dallas.

What I found when I went online and checked the monitors astounded me.  I had been heard 1500 miles north up in the edges of Arctic Canada and 1800 miles south in Costa Rica.  I had been picked up in the Caymans.  And I had solid reception numbers between the Appalachians and the Rockies.  I didn't make it over the hump of the big mountain ranges into coastal areas but this was a terrible day on the bands.  But, for a 5 watt radio on a terrible reception day that wasn't bad at all.

The rationale for the cheap rig was travel.  I am hesitant to check luggage containing an expensive radio and in some places you are liable to have the rig confiscated if you run across a customs or border official having a bad day.  I would worry a lot less about an under two hundred dollar setup than one costing thousands.  

My dad used to have a favorite aphorism that he stole from Will Rogers.  He would say, "Son, you can put a generator up a billy goat's behind.  But, it's gonna take a lot of work, neither one of you is going to be happy, there's going to be %@#$ (smelly stuff) all over you and everything around you before you're done and it still won't make electricity."

I think I have been trying to make electricity with a Billy Goat concerning the cheap little Chinese radio.  It was designed as a CW rig and it obviously does a great job of that.  I just need to either learn CW or worry less about my Yaesu.   

Eagles Nest

Sheila and I spent a couple of days last week at Greenleaf State Park in Eastern Oklahoma.  We had a cabin in an area titled "Eagles Nest."  Amazingly, as advertised, the first morning I was sitting on the screened in porch with my coffee I saw a couple of  beautiful eagles fishing the lake and then passing over the cabin.

The cabins, like many Oklahoma State Parks, were built by the WPA in the 1930's.  But, many of them were finished by German POW's during WWII.  Gruber was a prison camp.  The Teutonic influence shows.  Greenleaf Park is directly adjacent to the Camp Gruber military reservation.  These cabins are frequented by military families who have a family member deployed to Gruber which is now a national guard training center and special forces training area.

It was a quiet time for us.  The cabin had no television or internet so Sheila binged out reading.  I also got some reading in.  I managed to finally complete a line by line "deep read" of Paul Washer's "The Gospel of Jesus Christ."  It's less than fifty pages but packed with thought provoking material.  

The lack of television and internet took me back to a better time when instead of constantly taking in electronic information we sat quietly, read and perhaps listened to the radio.  In the picture, I am reading from my Kindle E-Book reader which lets me carry a ton of books in a tiny package and doesn't require an internet connection. In the background, I am listening to DeBussy on the tiny but powerful little shortwave radio I carry in my travel bag.  As a child and young teen I listened to shortwave a lot.  It let me hear the world far away from our humble little rural Oklahoma home.

One afternoon, Sheila and I broke out our tiny little mobility scooters and explored the paved hiking trails in the park.  Sheila loved it.  Since mobility has become a problem for both of us little adventures like this mean a lot.  We got to spend a couple of hours in the woods, enjoy a couple of wonderful views of the mountains and the river in the distance and remember better times when we were backpackers.  Those tiny, delicate looking little scooters that are powered by an electric drill motor and fold up small enough for a car trunk to hold two of them have been a great blessing.

I spent quite a bit of time on my micro ham station.  I managed to talk to nine states
including Florida and California on a battery powered radio about the size of a couple of packs of cigarettes and an antenna made up of a carefully measured and tuned piece of wire thrown up into a tree.  It doesn't take much skill to sit down at home with my sophisticated rig feeding a huge, carefully tuned antenna and talk to both coasts and even South America and Europe.  In that case, it's all about the atmospherics.  If conditions are right you can talk.  But, talking a thousand miles or more with a tiny little field rig feeding a piece of wire hung up in a tree is a bit of challenge.  I enjoyed it thoroughly.  I found several glitches that I will have to tinker with further.

We ate out a couple of times.  We had an early dinner at the Boom A Rang Diner in Ft. Gibson on the way down that is still causing me heartburn a week later.  These places must be franchises.  We had a fabulous lunch at one out west on one of our previous trips but I would love to forget this one if the heartburn would let me.  We had a fabulous Mexican lunch at El Lago in Gore.  The place was full of locals from miles around and a steady stream of military from nearby Camp Gruber came in and out.  Army and Air Force.  I asked for a grilled jalapeno with my meal and they brought me a plate of sliced and cleaned jalapenos fried to perfection.  The were delicious and the chile releno with my lunch was outstanding as well ... and huge.

We had yogurt, fruit and coffee for breakfast every day.  Easy, quick and no prep.  Just make coffee.  I always pack several of what I call "MRE Meals" when we travel.  These are quick meals that can be prepared with a hotel room or truck stop microwave.  The one shown is penne pasta Alfredo with pink salmon from retort packs and an avocado ranch salad from a refrigerator bag.  

The cabin had no internet, no television and no cell service.  I think the digital fast let  us relax.  Twice a day we would drive to the top of the mountain to the ranger station where you could pick up a cell signal and check for anything urgent. 

It was a quiet, pleasant little interlude, reading, listening to music, enjoying nature and the quiet and above all enjoying each other's company.   We need to do this more often.