10m winter sprint?

I am currently being dragged around a garden centre, will have some catching up to when I get back. Hopefully will have some sunlight time left.

Well done on those contacts Deb.

SangueG wrote:

I am currently being dragged around a garden centre, will have some catching up to when I get back. Hopefully will have some sunlight time left.

Well done on those contacts Deb.

Well, I hope you've done better than me. Early afternoon I suddenly got massive interference that wiped out all but the strongest stations. Spent over an hour trying to pinpoint it, then came to the conclusion that it must be the matching box on the VG4 multiband antenna. So, in the rain, I took that down and removed the 10m T2LT from the cabin and brought it down to the patio. After soldering a PL259 onto the feeder all was well with no interference. I guess Monday's job is waterproofing the VG4 matching box and plug.

Don't you just love amateur radio?

Do you need Saturday's scores tonight? Or will the whole log tomorrow evening be okay?

Deb

Oh dear, and I thought I was having a bad day. At least you've worked out the issue and can get yourself running again, that's a good thing.

I was out from about 10:30 to about 15:00 so missed the juiciest time for 10m. Felt like I was doing a Russian contest this morning before I went out, and right now am just trying to pick out back of the box stations from the US, but struggling.

You can post contacts / scores up tomorrow, that's fine. I will probably post what I have done today a bit later on. Will see if I can manage anything else after my tea. I am on 90 contacts as it stands right now.

Tomorrow's another day. Hopefully I won't have to go out quite so much.

Yes, better than me then. I did just over 50. I packed it in about 4 utc to get Alex's dinner 

Know what you mean about the Russian roulette this morning. I was hearimng Japan but no way could I get in with that cocophany going on. I started to get a bit picky until eastern Europe died out. Pleased to get Colorado and Arizona, that's the furthest I've got into the States this year on phone. If it wasn't for A's dinner, I might have got California or Oregon.

Okay then, I'll post my effort tonight. It'll be nice to see how much I've got to catch up.

Deb

Just posted mine. Looks like we both worked a number of the same people.

At 18:30 I put some calls out on CW, nothing back and no reports of my signal on the RBN so turned it all off.

I see I worked at least one, WA2CP, on both SSB and CW. If at the end of tomorrow everyone's scores are close and no one else has used CW then I'm happy to pull any dupe contacts I made to make it fairer.

No need, I'm happy with your dupes   

Deb

Just saw you got HK1T. Didn't even hear that one today. I thought I had a good path to South America, but looks like you've got an even better one. Well done!

I got W0MB - but failed to get N5TIT  

Finished at 16:30z today. There's probably a couple more hours to work a few more stations, but I've been on and off the radio for much of the day since about 08:00. Going to do a roast now.

My total for our little challenge is 167, if I haven't messed my records up. Will put the scores on the board once you, and Al if managed to get some radio time, have posted them.

I found today fun, but it started much slower for me here with a lot less stations operating, and many of those that were, were the same as yesterday. I started with one into China though so that made my day

Hope you both got to work the bands today, and anyone who wasn't joining in with us I hoped you caught at least a bit of the action over the weekend.

You did well, Neal. I stopped at 100 to get steak and chips for Alex who was Father Christmas again for local kids in our village hall. I'll put my log up later.

My best today was China.

My worst was screwing up the G90 for two hours because I'd played with the menu settings

Deb

You did awesome Deb. I can see quite a few on your list that I heard but they didn't hear me. I managed to get that Columbia station yesterday, but didn't manage to work the other S American ones that you did from Uruguay and Argentina. Great job!

G90.. it might just be the firmware level I have on mine, but if I disconnect power by the power cord (e.g. turn power supply off or turn car ignition off) and not by the power button on the radio, settings can go haywire in the radio. Don't know if by chance that's what you did possibly?

Father Christmas is a lucky man!

I think I may have made a mistake buying the G90, so here's the sad story.

Except for a niggly problem with the tuner seeming to skip a few khz now and then even though the display shows the correct frequency, it worked great for a few months.

Then I bought the SPA125B 100w tuner amp and the VG4 multiband vertical antenna. The tuner amp errors on anything over 3:1, so the instructions say. But in reality, I get random high SWR errors even though I know the antenna is well below 3:1, in fact my T2LT is 1:1 and the 125B still errors occasionally. But the biggest problem is random error messages 'ALC out of control.' When this happens, which is often, the amp sort of goes into runaway and shows upwards of 125w then closes down. I've reduced the line o/p gain and mic gain, but it still happens. I've searched all the menus and can't find anything to do with ALC. I'm only putting 1w into the amp. I contacted Raddiodity and they suggested reflashing the firmware, which I did, and I thought it worked as no errors for a few days, then it started to happen again.

As for the frequency skipping, Raddiodity said to do a reset (press the func button and tap the power button) I did that but the skipping still happens when the rig has been on for a long time.

Not sure what to do now.

Deb

Hi Deb,

When I was running my old FT757gx it seemingly squirted RF without problems into anything I slung up as an antenna. With the later FT710 it is much more 'sensitive' and I added a decent 1:1 choke on the antenna line alleviating any issues. (The mouse would jump around the screen and other occasional weird 'blips' suggesting RF was coming back down the line.)

I run a dual winding common mode type on an FT240-43 toroid for my QRP power but a double stack type should more than handle your power requirements.

Might be worth a look as I was scratching my head for ages with everything seemingly working fine (SWR, ALC, everything) but would apparently randomly spit it's dummy out now and then. Common mode problems can be a bit of a bugger often appearing to be a rig problem when it's simply issues with making the rig the 'counterpoise' or return path for your RF.

I hope you get sorted.

73,
Victor

You could be right, Victor, and thanks for the input.

There's a 1:1 transformer in the matching box attached to the VG4, and I've wound half a dozen 6" loops in the coax, plus I've wound 10 loops in a torroid close to the rig.

I now think the problem is more to do with the XPA tuner/amp. It's supposed to tune anything that's below 3:1, but I know the antenna is well under that. It even errors on my T2LT which is 1:1 across the whole of the 10m band.

I will buy or build a common mode choke to see if that helps, but for now I'm using the amp with the tuner part turned off and using a separate auto tuner which works fine.

Deb

Hi Deb,

I too initially had a 1:1 common mode choke that I built within my homebrew ATU that seemed to work fine with a couple of radios but the FT-710 just wasn't having any of it with the spurious random results I was getting. Turns out my apparently well thought out choke wasn't as good as expected and was proven with some further tests on my NanoVNA. (Coiled coax only works at specific frequencies too and not all that well with limited choke impedance.)

So in the end I went the whole hog and ordered some FT240-43 toroids mucking about with some well know windings, (Guanella, single coax wind etc.) before landing up with the double wind type. Details of which can be found on this link :- https://www.hfkits.com/manual-for-11-balun-150-watt-for-dipole-antennas/

The latter proved the most efficient with a high choking impedance across the bands and all was good. (Well almost, I had to experiment somewhat with my 9:1 Un-Un EFRW rewinding it several times until it also performed as expected!)

Common mode problems weren't something I'd originally envisaged as an interest path with my radio forays but proved a useful education.

Glad that you've found a workaround in the mean time and just thought I'd share my experiences in case it might be useful to anyone.


All the best and seasons greetings,
Victor