The Ghost and the touch lamp

I have a ghost in the house.   We have a touch lamp in the bedroom.  One of those lamps where you touch the top and the turns on and the more times you touch it, the brighter it gets.  Well the other day my wife said something was wrong with the lamp.  I walked into the bedroom and there it was cycling through the settings.  Pretty weird.  And then it just stopped.   Went back to playing with the radio and in a few min, she yells saying it was doing it again.

What in the work is going on.   Then I remembered I was playing with winmor (actually RMSexpress) and noticed every time I transmitted, the light cycled.   I am transmitting on 3.59150mhz.  The light likes that frequency.  

Interesting to me is that I am only transmitting at about 25watts.  Antenna is 50 feet away from the lamp.  Oh well,  new procedure,  Disconnect the lamp before I play with the radio.

10m Hamstick Dipole

I am still playing with  hamstick dipoles.  I ordered a pair of MFJ-1610T ham-tennas and they came in last week.   Got to try them out this morning.   They worked fine.  Got them tuned and throughout the 10m band the SWR was under 1.8:1.  The AA-54 chart shows exactly how flat it is:

So I got the antenna tuned.  The whips finally were set to be 39 inches.  Probably could lengthen them another inch and and get it a little better.

One new thing this time is when I raised the antenna from 8 feet to 16 feet in height, the SWR changed dramatically.  Don't know if this was the antenna, the weather, or just me this morning.  On the 20m version it got better as we raised it.  On this one adding height made it get worse.  Really worse.  I had to lengthen the whips from 30 inches to the 39 inches and that is where I wound up at.

Contacts I made with the antenna were fairly quick and easy.  Easy to Lithuania and Estonia that is.  Had the broadside oriented NE/SW. So with this one I also claim success.

I checked the SWR on other bands:

• 40m - 7.250mhz  = 10.1
• 20m - 14.30mhz  =  6.5
• 15m - 21.35mhz  =  4.1
• 10m - 28.70mhz  =  1.37
• 6m   - 50.125mhz=  4.8

This is what it looked like out in the yard:

My first split contact

I made contact with W1AW-4 portable 4.  This is the ARRL centennial station going around the US.  Today it was in Kentucky.  I heard the station on 14.240 and he said who he was and he was listening "up 2".   Ah, he is running a split.  I have never done this before.  

Gerry,  our local club president had told me about splits when while we were talking (ok, while he was telling several of us new hams one day about contesting).   But because he was such a good teacher and I had tried to set up a split before for using the 6m repeater I had something new to try.

Hit the split button on the 590, the the A/B button and set the B frequency to 14.242, Hit the A/B again and called out.  Saw the transmit on 14.242 and he then responded on 14.240.

It worked!!!  :-)    One more thing to be happy about today.

To be honest, I would have been just as happy if he did not call back but I managed not to step on him.  But it working they way it should have makes it even better.

80m Hamstick Dipole

I had such good luck with the 20m hamstick dipole that I got back out the 80m hamsticks and tried playing with that again.  Still no luck.   Here is the graph from the Rigexpert AA-54:

It is extremely narrow in the bandwidth.  So narrow that the digital part of the band is not available if we have it tuned for voice, and I am not sure even he entire voice portion of the band would be real useful without changing the length every time you change frequency.  Did not make any contacts on the frequency since the band was dead (as it stays during the day) and was not going to wait until evening to play with it.   I will try again some other day but as I have read other places,  the hamstick dipole is really only usable at 20m and below and 40m is iffy.  My experiments so far seem to agree with this.

More experiments with the 20m hamstick dipole

Played some more today with the 20m hamstick dipole.  It still seems to work which was good to begin with.  Repeatable results always make me feel good.

I first set it up at 8 feet and did some listening.  Reception was fine.  I then raised he antenna up to 16 feet.  Immediately got an increase of 4 S-units on the channels I was listening to.  20m=60'/4=15' for the quarter wave.  Got it above the quarter wave and that probably got it out of the ground effects and flattened out the radiation pattern.I know that that is primarily for transmitting, but I can attest it helped noticeably.

I then tried a contact.  Exchanged info with W1AW-4-portable 4.  The ARRL centennial station operating in Kentucky this weekend.  I will take that.  A little more on this in another post since it was my first contact doing a split.

I also experimented with the 20m dipole on 6m.  Here is the graph:

Not a great graph since everything is around 3, but definitely workable and the 590 can tune that all day long.  Looked to contact someone on 6 with no luck since I always find the band dead, but I was able to activate the 6m repeater so I claim it works.

Why a hamstick dipole

Before I started this set of experiments I asked myself why.  I have played with regular dipoles for a while and they work.  I started asking myself, how do I put up something in a hurry that can work.  Maybe if I want to go mobile, maybe if I want to go to the bring my radio park, maybe just as a backup if my normal antenna falls down.

I also kept asking myself how do I get some directionality from my setup since my location and wife sort of dictate a long wire antenna to be oriented east/west.  It is quicker to put up than a wire antenna in the trees or even on the pole in an inverted V.

I friend showed me one and it looked interesting.   The price was right.  The bracket/adapter was $20.00 and the 2 hamsticks were $15.00 each.  So for around $50.00 I could start playing.

So here we go.   Questions I have at this point are:
How well does it work?
How easy is it to use?
How easy is it to set up?
How hard is it to tune?
Does the tuning of the hamsticks change depending on conditions?
Will the hamsticks work on other bands than the one it is tuned for?
      Will 10m work on the 20m hamsticks?
Since length is important, does a 80m setup work or is it a dummy load as others have said?

Based on the internet research I have done to date, the answers to these questions are all over the place. Based on my experience with the 20m setup yesterday, things look positive.  But time will tell.

The plan right now is to play with the 20m setup.  I have a pair of hamsticks for 75m/80m so we will try them out.  I want to do some more analyzer work to see if 6m on the 20m hamsticks really is an option.  And based on my findings, I may get several other sets for different bands.

Hamstick Dipole 20m

I have wanted to try a hamstick dipole for a while.  In doing the research the conventional wisdom was that 20m and less would work, 40m was iffy, and 80m was just a dummy load.   So I decided to start my project using on the 20m band.   I acquired the MFJ-347 dipole adapter and a pair of MFJ-1620 hamsticks.   I put it all together and mounted it to my portable mast (painters pole) and started tuning.

I tuned, tuned, tuned and tuned some more.  It took a while.  You adjust the hamsticks by shortening and lengthening the whip portion of the hamstick.   I thought it should be linear but it was not.  I would change the length, but if you went too far, the resonance point would always move below the band.  Eventually I found that the magic length was 38 inches. With the whips at 38 inches, SWR at 14.070 (the PSK frequency) was 1:1.37.   The SWR at 14.300 was 1:2.3.  At this point might still be able to get closer, but wanted to give it a try.

I put 100' of RG8x between the radio and the antenna, Extended the mast up to 16' and started trying to find some one to talk to.  The bands were busy, but immediately I found someone.  I responded to II9Ps CQ and he responded right back.  On 14.268 he was 5x9 in Tallahassee and was transmitting from Sicily.   Can't argue with this.   I claim success.

The chart from the rigexpert AA54 is below.   The hamsticks seem flat enough throughout the band.  definitely usable.

I was hoping that the antenna would also work on 10m, but no such luck.  SWR off of the charts.  On the other hand, the SWR was 1:3 on 6m.  I will have to explore this some more.