2 meter conditions were great on Saturday! I was able to work
several stations at 450 miles completely random (no advance notice
or coordination) with my small station! Sunday was terrible
following passage of the cold front. I worked 29 stations in 18
grids on 2 meters. That's not bad considering 50 stations would be
about the limit for a kilowatt station here. I only went to 6 meters
when asked to QSY, working 12 stations in 9 grids there.
Now that my low power, small antenna days are hopefully about to
end, I will tell the rest of the story. Since my return to 2 meters
in June I have been running 25 watts to a laughable antenna. It is 7
elements (including 3 reflector elements) crammed onto a 6 foot
boom! I suspect it is optimized for the FM portion of the band,
though I haven't done any testing to confirm that. It was given to
me several years ago and had been lying in my shed until I grabbed
it and forced it into service after getting a transverter. I have
nearly 3.5 dB feedline loss. It is good cable but over 350 feet of
it. In three months of rather casual operating I have worked 13
states and 4 Canadian provinces with this setup, a result I am happy
with. Thanks to those who struggled to dig my signal out of the
noise this summer.
I have built a pattern optimized 13 element, 3.9 wavelength yagi
which will be going up soon. That should provide about 6 dB more
gain and hopefully lower noise on receive. I am in the process of
refurbishing the old 4CX1500B amplifier. Barring any unpredictable
events I hope to be running higher power within two weeks. I may
limit myself to 600 watts for a while, as I have no means of
measuring any more than that for tune up.
73,
Paul N1BUG FN55mf
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