Urs-o-Log

1 Year, 10 Watts and an endfed wire …

I am surprised what you can do with QRP if the band conditions are going up to the sun spot maximum … It is really fun to work only with 10 Watts.

Green spots: SSB
Yellow spots: Digital Modes (FT8,FT4,RTTY,VarAC)

The longest SSB distance was 9205 km with PP1WW in Brazil.
The longest DIGITAL distance was 18322 km with ZL2TNB in New Zealand.

Yesterday I took part in one of he biggest radio amateur contests “CQ World Wide DX Contest” which runs for 48h. However I did not take part full time :-). There were some times with high electromagnetic storms so the conditions sometimes were not so good.

As one of my neighbours insists that I have to take down my end fed random wire antenna mounted on a 10m fishing pole, I tested a replacement for my antenna during this contest. I set up an end fed half wave antenna (20 m long) mounted as inverted V with the middle of the antenna in a tree (about 6 m over the ground). Now the antenna is completely invisible and hopefully there is no one who can complain now. I need some more experience until I can say if the antenna performs better or worse than before, but the firsts tests this weekend were promising.

Here are my results of the contest:

CQ World Wide DX Contest SSB

I love to participate in radio amateur contests. I never will have a chance to win such a contest, but it is a great chance for a QRP station because there is much activity on the bands and there are many stations with “big ears” (= big antennas) who will be able to hear you even with low power.

Last weekend there were two contests, the “Worked All Germany Contest” contest in SSB and the “JARTS World Wide RTTY Contest” in RTTY and I took part in both of them.

With “Curacao” I worked a new DXCC country in SSB (over 8000 km) …

Here are my results, all QSOs with 10 Watt output on a 17m random wire antenna as inverted V on a 10m fishing pole (I did not take part full time but only from time to time during that weekend):

“Worked All Germany” SSB Contest

JARTS World Wide RTTY Contest

It is now 4 weeks since I got my small Elecraft KX2 shortwave transceiver and I heavily worked with it during that time. Time for a quick analysis of my over 600 contacts I made the last 4 weeks:

I made about 600 contacts and worked 54 DXCC countries. The table shows the countries and the number of QSOs:

The following map shows the the locations of my QSO partners. The green markers are SSB voice contacts with 10 Watts, the yellow markers are FT8 digital contacts with 5 Watts:

The longest distance was 9153 km in SSB with FR4KR on the island of Reunion.

Most of the contacts did happen during three contests (ARRL International DX Contest, Russian DX Contest, CQWW WPX Contest) and that explains why I was able to work all these countries. During contest times there are many stations with very big antennas and they will be able to hear me even with only 10 Watts and a EFRW antenna 🙂

I couldn’t believe it, but it is almost one year ago, since I posted something on my blog. There was no specific reason for that, I just didn’t have the desire to post anything here. This blog has changed more and more to a technical blog about IBM software and especially IBM (now HCL) Connections and nothing really happened in the last months which I thought would be worth to post here.

Maybe this will change again in future. During the Corona pandemic I spent more time at home and I rediscovered an old hobby of mine. I am a licensed radio amateur since 1982 (I got my license at the age of 17). However, I was only active for about 4 years and with my class “C” license I could only work on the VHF/UHF bands which was not so exciting. Then came study and profession and interests changed.

But now, after more than 35 years I am QRV again 🙂 And during that time, my old class “C” license has been converted to class “A” and I am now allowed to work also on the shortwave bands.

So I surfed a lot in the Internet, read many articles and blogs about ham radio, looked many, many YouTube videos about ham radio operations to get a feeling how things have changed during that 35 years 🙂 And really a lot has changed. especially all the new digital modes were not existing at the time I got my license.

So back in September 2021 I first bought an Anytone AT-D878UVII, a small portable device for the 2 m and 70 cm band which supports FM and also the new digital DMR mode and made my first QSOs just to get the feeling again. However some weeks later, it was clear that I need to get a device for shortwave operation as well. As I am living in an apartment house where I am not allowed to build big antennas, I thought, it is better to buy a portable device for shortwave as well, so that I can go somewhere outside and work from there. My choice fell on the Elecraft KX2 as it is very, very small and light, allows 10 W for SSB and also has a built-in antenna tuner.

I am using the KX2 now for 4 weeks and I am really impressed. I did not use it portable so far but only from my Home QTH with a 17 m random wire antenna with an 9:1 UnUn as Inverted V (mounted on a 6,5m fishing pole). During these 4 weeks I made over 600 QSOs (about 2/3 in SSB with 10 Watts and 1/3 in FT8 with 5 Watts) and worked 54 DXCC countries. Did I say that I am impressed what this small device can do? Ok, the conditions need to be good and the other stations need to have big antennas and a low noise level, but anyway …

I hope the weather will become better now in the upcoming weeks, so that I can also do some portable activities with the KX2. I will keep you informed, if there are any news 🙂

You can also visit my QRZ.com site, where you can see also some pictures of my “shack” and my “antennas” 🙂