OE2SNL, OE2WNL and OE2ATN | designed by OE2ATN | hosted by OE2WNL

Portable Rig & Portable Loop

woifal — Fri, 17 May 2013 09:34:04 +0000

OE2WNL used the last weekends and spare-time for some handicraft work and build a new portable Rig and a portable Loop antenna

Portable-Suitcase-Rig

My Portable Suitcase consisting of the following:

Small Suitcase bought from Conrad-Shop
FT-857D
LDG-100 Tuner
PL, N antenna-plugs
designed and printed some parts on my Solidoodle 3D Printer
Powerpole connectors, fuses and
some wire

The main problem was the space – I choosed this small suitcase to fit into my backpack so my rig has to fit inside – it took a while after I found the perfect combination of the ft-857 and the LDG-100 and the cables etc..
Also I wanted to have the antenna and power connectors on the outside. After some hours of fiddeling and drilling and mounting – the solution looks like this:

Portable-Loop

After that I looked up the internet for a tutorial for portable loop antennas. I found some great sites:

Big thanks to those guys!!

So I

cut some Ecoflex-10,
bought an electric-box,
PVC-Pipe,
tripod from my digital-camera
designed and printed some parts on my 3D-Printer (all the blue parts you see on the pictures) and last but not least
asked my neighbour Franz for some capacitors for testing. (special thanks for that

Thanks to the calculation-sheet from DL8NDG I aimed for a Loop of 1m diameter, so 3,142m of Ecoflex for the big loop and 62,8cm for the small loop (abt. 1/5)

As the capacitor is just a normal one usually used for just receifing – I tested it with 5W FM and saw no sparks jumping through the plates (10W already showed little sparks)
so I definitly have to go with a capacitor with greater distance of the plates – these can be bought from Schubert Gehäuse which I’m expecting to receife soon. I choosed DK4 and DK7 I will see soon how this works.

But back to my current setup with the small capacitor. As 5 watts seemed to work I definetly wanted to test my setup with QRP 5W only – and it should be sucessfully

I build up the antenna in about 4minutes, plugged the coax into my rig-suitcase, pluged my 12V 7AH battery in and started working.

After some searching I found a strong station on 20m GS3PYE/P was calling and having some stations answering. So a bit away I tuned the capacitor for maximum noise and tuned with 5W to lowest SWR. As there where some other strong stations calling him I tried more than once – but finally he recogniced the portable QRP station and gave me a real nice report of 56 with which I was very happy.

Later I tried again on 20m and heard a station from the azores CU5AQ I tried calling him and he answered me with real 57 report – I’m very happy about such nice reports.

A station from sizilly island IT9… on 40m was not able to hear me for a report so I guess the efficiency on 40m is not good – probably this can be enhanced when using the new capacitor and using 10 or 20W.

Summary

All in all I’m very pleased with the results – it feels great to build an antenna which works in QRP 5W mode into about 3500km distance. Sure band has to be quite and no strong stations beside – but with some patieness I can work europe stations.

OE2013SNL special call

tom — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:27:16 +0000

Until the FIS Ski World Championships 2013 in Schladming, Austria, I was active with the callsign OE2013SNL. It was valid for a Short Time Award from January 15th to February 18th, 2013.

Find out more about the award on http://wmdiplom2013.oevsv.at/opencms/diplom.html

I am counting 3.300 QSOs with 2.550 individual stations! It was a lot of fun to get on the air with this special callsign. There was a surprising great demand and I enjoyed the PileUps very much!

Many thanks to all OMs for working me!
73 de OE2SNL, Franz

OE2013SNL QSL cards

triple SOTA activation

tom — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:39:12 +0000

One last (for this week) spontaneous SOTA trip happened today. As weather was not as predicted we HAD to go out and activate a few more summits in this fabulous winter landscape…Another DX contact was logged with William W4ZV in North Carolina!
With no trees quite windy again but our shack behind this cornice at the first summit was quite comfortable…
(click the picture for a larger view)

vy 73s from OE2SNL Franz and OE2ATN Tom

14km snowshoe track with 3 summits + DX

tom — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:06:10 +0000

DX from SOTA seems to be a solid point of the agenda these days… As every year I activated three summits today, which only can be reached by snowshoes.And again I was very happy to take N4EX and W4ZV into my log. Up on the first summit I had to QRT after 4 QSOs due gusts of wind. I enjoyed my operation on the 2nd and 3rd summit with 14 and 19 QSOs.

Summit to summit was on the agenda as well – Mike 2E0YYY/P worked me on OE/SB-325 from G/SP-013. Appreciate that!

I think this was it with my winter-bonus-activations, my feet have to cool down now
73! OE2ATN, Tom

5 more activations and DXDX!

tom — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:47:07 +0000

Today we skied another few summits. OE2ATN did five, OE2SNL three summits. We both were proud to take some DX stations into our logs again…WX on the first two summits was EXTREMELY windy. I had to pull my jacket over my head and so I must have looked like a headless man. I even had to turn on the background light of the KX3… On top of that I had some problems with my audio, but I could manage that.

Nevertheless a very nice day again with some real pileup-fun. DX to USA with 5W into the Buddipole in phonie is amazing. N4EX, N1EU and W4ZV in phonie and for Franz N4EX and W4ZV in cw.

Thank you for working us!
OE2ATN, Tom
OE2SNL, Franz

WX prediction for tomorrow seems not very good – maybe I have to cancel my snowshoe operation… You will see on sotawatch…

5 SOTA activations and first real DX!

tom — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:12:03 +0000

It seems it wasn`t enough that we have done amazing 5 summits today – the first real DX contacts from SOTA summits came into the log! WX was fantastic but we were in a little hurry because of the closing-time of the cablecars…So we had to break down our “shack” on the summits quite fast after having enough contacts for a valid activation. We needed to catch a few cablecars after our last summit – it was very close but we also managed to get the last one which took us up to the slope down home.
Of course the cablecars do not take you up to the very top of the summits – so we didn`t break rules

The most amazing thing(s) today were 2 QSOs:

with N4EX Richard in North Carolina from OE/SB-189 Hochalmspitze @ 10W from the KX3 into the Buddipole Dipole Antenna on the 20m band, and
with W4ZV William in North Carolina from OE/SB-321 Hohe Penhab @ same power and band.
.

Both were about 7.500 km away from us. It was a bit hard to transfer reports but a very friendly station from Great Britain helped a little and as the conditions came up we could hear each other at about 44.
For me that`s very impressive and I`m sure now that my TRX/antenna combination for SOTA works very well. By the way – I used my very simple iphone-headset for the first time today and got very good reports!

Special thanks go to all regular customers on all our SOTA activations!

We took 15 lifts today, skied down 25 kilometers and got abt. 6.000 vertical meters at the end of the day.
Tomorrow I`m going to activate two more summits in the morning and again together with OE2SNL 3 more summits in the afternoon. Then we have been to all summits in our ski-area this season. On Wednesday -if WX allows- I will walk abt. 15 km on my snowshoes and do another 3 summits…

CU!
Tom, OE2ATN (phonie)
Franz, OE2SNL (cw)

SOTA OE/SB-330 Hochtölzer

tom — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 11:40:29 +0000

Just 4 points today but a quite “cool” activation… I wanted to activate my SOTA gear once more before snow makes it hard to reach all our summits for a while. Today probably was the last activation this fall. Maybe there will be one more chance in late 2012 (activation by ski). The next summits then will be activated in spring 2013 by snowshoes – YEHAAA!

9 stations made it into the log today in 9 minutes
OE2SNL, EA2CKX, G0VWP, 2E1HTG, G0RQL, EB2JU, G4ELZ, M0BKV, EB2CZF

As the weather was not very comfortable (quite windy and only abt. 5 deg centigrade) there are no nice pictures – I just want to show you this iphone-panorama (click it for a bigger view):

vy 73 de OE2ATN
Tom

Franz achieved mountain goat status!

tom — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 05:29:11 +0000

As of yesterday when Franz did another 3-summit-tour he has gained more than 1.000 activator points in the SOTA-program. Congratulations to the new “mountain goat status”!Yesterday tuesday Franz activated another three 10 point summits and has now 1.010 points on his activator log. He made 86 QSOs frome the three summits and is the only 8th Austrian activator who reached the 1.000 points mark.

Many many congrats from all of us! Wish you many more funny activations out there!
We are looking forward to hearing from you soon!

73 de OE2ATN, Tom

view the congrats in the SOTA reflector

… by the way – this is our 100th blog post …