My first POTA activation

Today I did my first POTA (Parks on the Air) activation. There is a POTA location (DE-0238 Wilhelmsbad State Park) just 4 km away from my home so I gave it a try.

The conditions were not so well today, but I made 21 SSB contacts in 2 hours with one DX contact to Canada. My equipment was my Elecraft KX2 with 10 Watts and a C-Whip monoband vertical antenna (one for 40m, one for 20m) with a mag mount on my car. In addition I used a magentic pad to get a better grounding.

On 40m it was very difficult because there were some QRM with almost S9 on the whole band so I switched soon to 20m.

You can find out more of this location on the official website.

Thank you to all hunters today!

Live is too short for QRP :-)

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.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1: USB-C ports no longer working

I had the issue that the USB-C ports on my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 all of a sudden did no longer work. I tried everything like removing the latest driver updates, reinstalling all the Lenovo drivers, did a BIOS reset etc.

Nothing helped.

I then did a battery reset (there is a small hole at the bottom of the ThinkPad which you need to press with a small pin) and voila: Everything worked again …

So if you have a similar issue, try that before sending your ThinkPad back to Lenovo for a mainboard replacement 😉

CQ World Wide DX Contest SSB

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

Results of the Contests of Last Weekend

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

External Microphone for Elecraft KX2

I bought my Elecraft KX2 as a bundle which should have included also an external microphone, the Elecraft MH3. Unfortunately, Elecraft is not able to deliver this microphone for several months now, so I was looking for a replacement.

It seems that there are no real replacement microphones for the MH3 on the market. I found the AlexMic, which can also no longer be delivered and a Heil microphone with an adapter for the KX2 which is offered by Lutz Electronics in Switzerland, but this is really expensive.

By accident, I did find an instruction by Richard (2M0NEG) how to change a Retevis microphone to work together with the KX2. The Retevis microphone itself looks identical to the Elecraft MH3, although I am not sure if it is also technically identical.

However, it is working fine for me. I am only using the PTT button, the up/down buttons are NOT working (I did not try if it can be used somehow, as I do not neeed it).

Here are the links to the

microphone

and the

TRRS plug

which I used. The wire colors of the microphone have changed compared to Richard’s instructions:

Mic+ (Tip)Red
Ground (Sleeve)Black
PTT logic ground (Ring 2)Green
PTT (Ring 1)Pink
<unused>White
PIN assignment

In the Elecraft KX2 configuration I set “MICBIAS” to “ON” and “MIC BIN” to “PTT”.

The total cost was under 30 EUR, which is much cheaper than the original mic or the Heil microphone and it does work pretty well for me.

By the way, in addition to the external microphone, I am also using this Sennheiser headset which does also work very well with the KX2.

Testing my new AlexLoop

Today I was portable QRV on a small hill near my home QTH and was testing my new AlexLoop Magentic Loop Antenna. Unfortunately the band conditions were not very good today due to some magnetic turbulence, so I am not able to really say something about this antenna.

I made only 7 QSOs, all within Europe and the farthest contact was to the island of Thassos in Greece, which was about 1600 km (with 10 Watts, SSB).

All reports, I got, were not really good. I was readable but with a very low signal.

However, I really had no QRM at all on all bands. Even on 40 m, where I have S7-S8 at home with my random wire antenna during daytime, there was really no QRM at all. There was some QRN from lightning later in the afternoon, but I still could read signals where the S-meter did not move 😉

The antenna has one real benefit: It comes with a handy backpack with some smaller pockets were you can store all the stuff you need. I am QRV 6 minutes after arrival and it does not need much space. I will not be able to do so with a wire antenna 😉

So, I will try again if the band conditions are in a better shape and we will see how this antenna compares to a random wire antenna in a tree.

QSO with FR4KR (Reunion Island) finally confirmed

The QSL card for my connection from Maintal to Reunion Island (9160 km) has finally arrived. It is the furthest distance so far I was able to make a contact to. SSB on 15m with 10 Watts into a random wire antenna. If the conditions are great and the other station has big ears, then this is possible even with QRP. However, the 59 report is not the real report I guess as this connection has happened during a contest.

My ham radio log analysis after 4 weeks of activity

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:

List of worked DXCC countries

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:

Location map of the QSO partners

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 🙂

Long time no see …

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” 🙂