6m – K7JLX's blog

It’s been a while and this will be a big post! My partner and I were able to go camping over the weekend, and if you’ve read any of my blog posts you won’t be surprised that I took the opportunity to practice some comms and off grid operating. I wanted to work HF, do some shortwave listening, and see if I could do any UHF/VHF communications. Additionally I wanted to run off of the 100AH battery box for a couple days to see how well it held up under constant use. This is also the first camping trip I brought the speaker stand antenna mast setup on.

On the way out I ran APRS with the Kenwood TM-D710G and the COMET-NCG CA-2X4SR antenna that mounts on the hood of the 4Runner. I noticed that on the way out that I had APRS coverage nearly the whole way out.

The first night we arrived late so I did a bit of SWL. I mostly got Radio Havana Cuba, Radio Nikkei, a distant station broadcasting in Mandarin, and Radio New Zealand International.

The next day I set the antenna up following a fun walk in the woods below the camp site. Most of my work on HF was done using the usual Endfedz Trail friendly 10/20/40m antenna. I strung it between the 4Runner and my portable antenna mast. I also added a 6m end fed dipole to the setup to see if I could reach Kevin, K7AJK from my camp site on the Lab599 TX-500. We had no luck. I wasn’t actually able to make any voice contacts on 20m with this setup even running at 10W, but there was a contest on the band so it was both congested and I suspect folks were running at fairly high power levels to make contacts. As you’ll be able to see from photographs I did a little hack with a stick I found to push the antenna higher off the ground on the truck side. It was especially helpful in preventing the hatch back from striking the antenna.

View of an antenna mast guyed to the ground and a line with an antenna running to a SUV in the background — Guyed antenna mast with two antennas added

View of an SUV with a piece of wood lashed to the roof rack holding some paracord off of the top of the vehicle. — Found piece of wood used to push the antenna higher off of the roof of the 4Runner

An antenna tied to paracord running from the upper-right corner of the photo to a mast several feet away on the edge of a hill. The transformer for the antenna is visible with feed line hanging down. Forest in the background. — The Trail Friendly Endfedz is strung along some paracord to prevent damage to the antenna if the mast blew over.

After a few hours of having no success running phone I decided to switch to packet. Moving the radio into the vehicle reduced the SWR and allowed me to run the entire setup from the 100AH battery since I had used the 4.5AH battery quite a bit for SWL already. I had also been simultaneously been running my 2m rig and APRSDroid on the tablet connected via Bluetooth to the mobile radio with a Mobilinkd TNC3+. I was able to send a number of text messages back and forth between friends using SMSGTE, which was nice given the complete lack of cell service. At this point I was still using the antenna on the truck.

A Raspberry Pi connected with a Lab599 TX-500 radio via two cables sitting in the back of a 4Runner. — Lab599 TX-500 connected to the off grid Raspberry Pi

A tablet sitting on a metal camping table running the JS8Call application. — Tablet running JS8Call

A toolbox with power connections running from it sitting in the front seat of a vehicle. — 100AH battery box connected to the Kenwood TM-D710GA in the vehicle, the Lab599 TX-500, and some lighting.

After quite some time operating on digital I decided to test some configuration changes I made to js8cli to increase the accuracy of maidenhead coordinates I was submitting to APRS-IS via Internet-connected stations running JS8Call. I had some pretty good luck as my position was accurately reported.

A photograph of the screen of a tablet showing the JS8Call application running. A callsign, timestamp, and 10-digit maidenhead coordinate are displayed prominently in the photo along with a screen showing contacts with other stations. — JS8Call screen shot showing a 5-level maidenhead position set via js8cli running an daemon mode

A screenshot of the website aprs.fi showing a Google satellite map with a rectangular marker for K7JLX placed in a clearing. — My position as displayed on aprs.fi

Apart from all the fun I had on HF, and walking around the forest with my HT (where I was reliably digipeated at 5w) I also figured I’d try to see if I could hit some of the repeaters in the Portland area, so I swapped the vertical antenna on the vehicle for my collapsable J-pole and speaker stand antenna mast. Much to my surprise I was actually able to get into the repeaters in the Portland area at 5w, but it was a bit sketchy as sometimes they wouldn’t key up. Apart form that I could get a bunch of APRS stations and digipeaters as well as some folks on the 2m calling frequency. I actually ended up having much better luck on 2m than on HF this time around.

The head unit of a Kenwood TM-D710GA radio placed on the dash of a vehicle. — Kenwood TM-D710GA on the dash of the 4Runner

A 4Runner with an antenna mast tied to the front bumper and connected to the vehicle with feedline. There's a camping table and chairs to one side and in the background are trees, a valley and a mountain on the other side of the valley. — The 4Runner antenna hood antenna swapped for an elevated J-Pole on the speaker stand mast.

Close-up of paracord tying the the antenna mast to steel tubing on an offroading bumper. — Using paracord to lash the antenna to the bumper of the truck

As you might have noticed from the pictures above I ended up moving the antenna because winds were getting higher and I was afraid the antenna might move side-to-side on the bumper’s tubing. I ended up shifting it toward the driver’s side where I could secure it to both the tube running horizontally and to the spot where the tube split, meaning the mast wouldn’t shift from side to size because it was secured with the paracord on both axes. since the antenna mount on the vehicle uses the same connector as most of my coax and the J-pole I was able to just connect the J-pole directly to the existing cabling in the 4Runner. Easy!

For the entire trip apart from doing some SWL with the TX-599 on its 4.5AH battery away from the truck and by the fire ring I ran all the lighting and radios from the 100AH battery box. We charged the tablet, my partner’s phone, and my phone from the battery box as well. We only drew down to 96% in two days. One day had a lot of heavy radio usage as well so that’s all a good sign.

Yellow witch's butter growing from the top of a tree stump with diamond cut patterns.

Some witch’s butter we found on a stump near our camp site

Speaker stand with wooden dowel set up in a yard with an endfed dipole antenna attached to a dowel in the top of the antenna with red paracord extending right out of frame. — 6m endfed dipole attached to the portable speaker stand antenna mast.

Hello, long time and no post! Tonight I decided to test out an antenna a friend of mine, K7AJK, let me borrow which also enabled me to make my first attempt to work 6m! This antenna is a Par EndFedz 6m end-fed dipole, and it works on, you guessed it! The 6m (50-54MHz) band. This is my first attempt at working this band, and yet another attempt to make phone (voice) contacts with my Lab599 TX-500, a newer QRP rig which is capable of a maximum transmit power of 10W. With this antenna and band I decided to attempt to use single-sideband (SSB) for my phone contact as most of my digital communications and work use SSB. Since I’m working SSB instead of FM, the antenna should be oriented horizontally to ensure better signal propagation and better changes of making contact with other SSB stations. The kind of propagation I’m going for here is groundwave propagation, meaning I’m attempting to get my signal out over the ground to reach other stations rather than attempting to bounce it off the atmosphere as would be the case with other types of 6m propagation. To get the antenna up and off the ground away from the roof and gutters of the house I set my speaker stand antenna mast up with the “matchbox” end of the antenna connected to some guy wire eyelets on the dowel portion of the mast, and the other end attached to a post coming up from some raised garden beds. This got the antenna about 9-10′ off the ground and away from the gutters which is fine for a test run.

Lab599 TX-500 radio powered up and tuned to 50.125 MHz sitting on a chair arm along a microphone. — QRP radio tuned to the 6m calling frequency.

A good place to start when attempting to make contacts on a specific band is to choose that band’s calling frequency, or at least a region of the band that others using the mode you’ve chosen are likely to be. For 6m SSB the calling frequency is 50.125MHz, in the bottom half of the band. I use this handy chart by iCOM to keep track of what regions are used by operators, and to understand specific frequencies that have specific uses such as SSTV and calling frequencies. I parked on the 6m SSB calling frequency and called a few times with no answer. I enlisted the help of Kevin, K7AJK to see if he could use any antenna and tune his radio to the calling frequency. As I asked him to do that another station in Vancouver, WA that was about 10 miles away came in running 50W. As I began a QSO with the other station at 5W K7AJK’s station got the brunt of the power as it was nearby. Fortunately he had his attenuator on and even with a vertically polarized antenna it swamped the receiver. As that was happening I was able to drop power to 1W and then raise it to 2.5W. The station in WA was still able to read me at lower power levels, albeit I was scratchy. That bodes pretty well none the less. The radio also drew less than 1A at 5W of transmit power as measured with a Buddipole PowerMini that I hooked up. The radio drew about 0.13A receiving only.

Tag: 6m

Camping in the Tillamook State Forest (1/21-23/2022)

First time working 6m