Gents,
Sorry to be so late, but it has been a day and a half of trying to get thing moved from the deck to the shed, garage, or basement.? Still some work to do, mostly getting antennas down and coax put away, but I am almost, but not entirely, keeping the XYL pleased with removal of FD stuff from the deck.
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Had a good time FD weekend.? A better balance between fun and work than in some past efforts.? We had two of the three stations set up for digital, 2 of the 3 for CW, and 2 of the 3 for phone (although not used). I think we made a bit more than 1000 QSOs.? As far as I know, there was not a single phone QSO. ?We had two mostly CW ops, and three mostly digital ops, and I think the digital modes beat out CW for most points.? .? ?
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So now all the excuses can start rolling in.? More digital ops (so, where were the CW dudes?), digital was on more hours (again, where were the CW dudes?), more radios on digital (again, where were the CW dudes).? You do, or you do not.? There is no ¡°try¡±.? (Yoda) ?
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Some early thoughts on what went well/not so well:
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Positives:
- Setup was a bit more leisurely than in the past.? Having only a few wire antennas, one yagi, and the 40m vertical array made setup pretty simple.? All antennas except the 15m dipole were up and ready to go by Friday evening.?
- Learned a good bit about operating completely on solar/battery power.? We were able to operate essentially all we wanted to, but towards the end of the 24 hour period we were having to get creative on swapping out batteries to keep all three stations on the air.? But we did it.
- The advance work on getting N1MM and WSJT-X working together, and getting all the stations networked, was time well spent.? The software worked like a champ, all bands, all modes.?
- It was a good idea to have a couple extra batteries.? Although the 100 A-hr batteries should have been enough, they weren¡¯t.? The extra batteries gave us hours of additional operation.
- Tim¡¯s solar panel setup is a winner.? Saturday we ran one radio and three laptops off of that system.? Overnight, two laptops were run from it.? In the morning, one radio and three laptops were run off of it, and when the other batteries petered out around 11am, Tim¡¯s setup powered three stations and three laptops until the end.? The battery was still above 50 percent capacity last time I looked.
- Staying with CW and digital made for a quiet time on the deck.? Us digital ops were chatting away on many topics while also working one a minute on digital at times.
- So, not sure if this is positive or negative.? Bad news is that we found a yellow jacket nest Friday, and I got stung a few times.? Good news is that I found it, and not one of the grandkids.? This evening, I took two cans of wasp/hornet spray out to the spot and dug up the nest while fogging the area.? Got the nest dug up and well saturated with? bug spray.? Only got stung twice more.? Fair trade.? No more issues for the grandkids to find.? ?????
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Negatives:
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- We were a bit shy of what we really needed in battery capacity.? We had two nominal 100 A-hr batteries that should have been adequate for about 10 hrs at 10A average load.? But those batteries lasted only about 5 or 6 hours.? Maybe the current was higher, maybe the batteries are a bit over-rated.? In any case, they are good for 5 hours, not 10.? One or two more would have been enough.
- Sunday morning it was well into the day (maybe 1000) before the 100W solar panels began contributing appreciably.? To operate in the early morning hours, we need more battery capacity.?
- We tried once again to raise the steppir for FD use, and it turned out not to be working.? That antenna is a bit complex.? Maybe we should forget that one and use a simple tribander if we want a yagi.?
- While the antennas seemed to be working well (except the yagi), some of the bandpass filters seem to be busted.? Need to do some testing and fine/fix the problem filters.
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I¡¯ll try to get the score submittal ready tomorrow.?
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I¡¯m sure I¡¯ll think of more.?
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Just my opinion, I may be wrong.
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Dave UW
