2010-04-16 & 17: DX Plan on Bradshaw Trail

[OLLIE]

This weekend on the Bradshaw Trail trip I'm going to try and throw up my G5RV dipole antenna each night. I will monitor the below frequencies at the given time below. I will stay on the frequency in bold at each given time and monitor. If there is high traffic on the primary frequency I will go to the secondary frequency after five minutes (7:35 pm / 8:05 pm). Five minutes later I will try the tertierry frequency for five minutes. If there is no traffic on the primary (bold) frequency I will just stay on and monitor that frequency the whole time.

SATURDAY AND SUNDAY
7:30 pm
14.300 USB
Secondary : 14.295 USB
Tertierry: 14.305 USB

8:00 pm
3.830 LSB
Secondary: 3.825 LSB
Tertierry: 3.835 LSB

[xtatik]

Ollie, FYI at 7:30 @14300 you'll be inside the PacSea Net warmup. I'd suggest up or down 10.

[DaveK]

Ollie, FYI at 7:30 @14300 you'll be inside the PacSea Net warmup. I'd suggest up or down 10.

Yeah, he's gonna get buried. I hope he gets this in time.

[xtatik]

Ollie, FYI at 7:30 @14300 you'll be inside the PacSea Net warmup. I'd suggest up or down 10.

Yeah, he's gonna get buried. I hope he gets this in time.

He may be alright. He'll just have to move right away. 14300 is a lousy spot to pick due to 24hr maritime nets. I hope he brought a minimum 33 ft fiberglass mast to hang the G5RV on cuz half the radiation happens in the twinlead feedline and I don't recall any pucker bushes or Tamarisks that are that tall out there......we'll see.

[xtatik]

Well, I punched a few out there at about 600w on each freq. on 20...... to no avail. I was worried about crashing the PacSea net so I bailed. Sometimes the Hawaiian station (KH6RC, Randy) will have his beam pointed south and you won't hear him off the side of his beam....decided not to risk it further. He knows who I am and would think I'd gone nuts or something.
But, E51JD was back on at 14235 so I put another Rarotongan station in the log. Icould thru his pile-up last time....So, I am glad I had a reason to boot the radio (Thanks Ollie!). I also heard a Fullerton station make contact with the E51, so I doubt distance was a factor.

edit: Well as is typical, "lotso' old-timey ragchewin'" on all of the 80m freq's selected. That band is hilarious.

[DaveK]

I got the same results, but with only 100 watts. Perhaps a different frequency next time.

[xtatik]

I got the same results, but with only 100 watts. Perhaps a different frequency next time.

Yeah, 80m is a terrible place to try and make a casual contact. So much of the band is claimed by a bunch of old men that have their "nets". This is where they sit around (sometimes for hours) with their vox units on (too strenuous to key something you know) and burn up the E-layer with massive loops and minimum 1Kw signals.
Better to wait until much later (like 10:00 pm) and use 40m. Or, much earlier 3-6:00 on 20m. However, 20m maybe too long in any case.
Kinduva' shame as 40m is working real well right now. I just wrapped up a joint call with a couple guys... one on Kodiak Island, the other on Maui.....and I'm the putz sitting in Costa Mesa....whatsup with that?

[OLLIE]

Well, I just got back and saw these posts. I got my G5RV up and was trying to work the plan as I laid it out in the first post. On 20M I couldn't get squat as 7:30 pm. So around 7:45 pm I tuned up to 80M. 80M was banging clear across the band. I couldn't get a word in edge wise. Like Randy said, it sounded like everyone was on VOX because there were no breaks... It sounded like a phone conversation. The folks around the campfire thought it was neat. Around 9:00 pm I disconnected my G5RV and hooked back up to my ATAS-120. I tuned to 14.300 and was amazed at the traffic on 20M. My ATAS out performed my G5RV by 500%. I guess like Randy said I needed to get the G5RV up higher. I had a great time messing with it though. About every hour or so I'd fire up my mobile HF and listen in on 20 Meters. I caught several of the Maritime nets.

Randy,
Maybe you can answer a question for me on the FT-857 and the ATAS. What's the difference when your radio shows "ATAS" vs. "atas" on the radio when you turn to different bands? I thought the ATAS-120 was good for tuning to 80M but I couldn't get it to autotune to that band.

[xtatik]

Ollie,
The ATAS won't do 80m...But, don't let that bother you, IMO 80m and lower are ragchew or novelty bands. You need to concentrate efforts on 15, 17, 20 and 40m.. This is where most of the action is, and they are your most reliable bands. They are also much easier with regards to rigging antennas. You're right about the 80 QSO's sounding like phone conversations......these guys get on their nightly and take ownership of the place...and the content of their QSO's can be hilariously ridiculous. Serious looney-tunes!
As for the ATAS v. atas, usual that is telling you that either you are out of band or outside the tuning limitations of the antenna. However, the ATAS can be manually pushed to tune some add'l bands or spectrum (can't remember which/where) as stated in the manual.
You may want to consider a different antenna for remote work. The G5RV can work well in some situations, but in general are poor antennas. The touted multiband aspect lures many into buying them, but all require a broad tuner to allow full xmit power from most modern xcvrs. But, all the tuner is doing between the G5RV and xcvr is giving the xcvr "warm fuzzies" in order to get the xcvr to put full fire into the wire. The tuner does nothing to bring the antenna into actual resonance and therefore it radiates and hears poorly. Next time, try your idea of rigging a balun with interchangeable resonant wires (1/2 wave dipoles). BTW, it dawned on me the day after the HRO event that the Alpha-Delta center insulator is not really a balun. In general, dipoles will work better if a balun is used at the center insulator position. It allows the unbalanced signal delivered by the coax (which is unbalanced) to be more evenly distributed to each element

[OLLIE]

The guys on 80M actually sounded like a bunch of old CB'ers.

So... would I wire a balun into the rig with the Alpha-Delta center piece or just not use the center piece? Can you point me to a schematic?