12/16/2023 0 Comments Icom ic7300 and fldigi setupI started operating the North American QSO party just after 1800 UTC and operated off and on through about 0000 UTC. I have it pointed on a roughly North bearing. All told it took about 30 minutes and that was doing things slowly. I had taken it down due to inclement weather so this was a good test on how long it takes to setup in the field. I decided to deploy the 2 element 20m vertical beam. I finished up by 17:30 UTC and started to setup for the North American QSO party. Saturday morning was a bit hectic for me this week as I had some errands to run early. Lot’s of fun for a Saturday afternoon of radio! Overall score was 98 QSO’s on three bands for a score of 4508. 20m was the band to be on during the afternoon hours although 15m seemed to be open to the west cost.75% of my QSO’s were on 20m. Once I started using it I would get “big signal” comments on occasion. It collapsed again at some point just after sundown when the band had closed.Īll in all the 20m Inverted-V performed well. Once again redeployed the mast and this time it stayed up for the remainder of the time I operated. After getting it redeployed it collapsed again as I was walking away from it. The first time this happened I noticed the bandscope on the IC-7300 go blank went outside and saw the mess. The second issue is that the wind would cause sections to collapse forming the tangled mess I described in a previous post. The first is that the antenna wires would get blown into a nearby tree while extending the Spiderpole. It was quite windy yesterday afternoon with gusts up to 30mph from the North. I got a late start as I wanted to setup for 20m using the Inverted-V dipole up 30 feet on the Spiderpole. I’ll likely try the -61 mix first as it is better suited for higher frequencies.Īfter a lively Radio Club meeting yesterday morning I went home and decided to prepare to operate during the NA QSO party. The ferrite mix has a big influence inductance change vs power level. Fortunately, I have an FT-140-61, FT-240-43 and FT-240-31 I can experiment with. UPDATE: I did some research on ferrite coupling of MLA and came across some good information at N4SPP’s website. I actually made several contacts with the loop only a few feet off the floor inside the house. The good news: The capacitor worked great at 100W with FT-8! No sign that the dielectric was breaking down or that any arcing occurred. Will work on a solution and retry the testing There are a few things I can try but the most obvious is to use a bigger toroid. As the toroid gets hotter it shifts the match. If I suspend transmit for a minute or two, the effect would drop off and then slowly rise again after each transmit.Ĭonclusion: the toroid is heating up with higher power. At 100W the SWR would reach 2:1 before the end of the transmission and the power out would start to roll back. It would start higher after each FT-8 transmission. This time I started testing at 5W which was stable. The antenna was connected to the Icom 7300 and I was running FT-8 as a stress test. I used an FT140-43 toroid with 3 turns of wire to tune in 20m (14.070 MHz) at about 1.6:1 min SWR. I setup the capacitor with the PETG dielectric in the RG-213 coax loop as before. Will be interesting to see how HF works especially with an NVIS antenna. The FT-817 is nice in that it can work VHF & HF with the Signalink. My next experiments will likely center around setting up an NVIS antenna for HF and getting setup on my portable rigs. Packet VHF works well except I am still have an issue when using K5RAV-10 in which I can send email but not receive it.Īll in all, it looks like the setup works for both HF and VHF WinLink. VARA FM works quite well and is relatively fast. On VHF packet there are several new stations that I can use. Here again I was able to complete an exchange with HF stations up the state from here. I adjusted the output signal to indicate 1/3 of the ALC range. On the IC-7300 be sure to select CV-I for PTT method and leave DTS and RTS unchecked. I downloaded and installed VARA HF and was able to get it setup with minimal issue. I had the best luck with stations up state on 40m and was able to verify connections and exchanges. We have local HF stations now on 40m, 30m and 20m but I could not access them. I found these instructions useful for the IC-7300 ARDOP setup. On HF I found that the old WINMOR method has largely been replaced by ARDOP and VARA is of course available as well. I don’t use WinLink too often, especially on HF, but with the recent local repeater changes on VHF I decided to test as many access modes so I don’t fumble around with setting when I may need them the most.
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