West Park Radio Ops 2013 

W8VM Field Day is live and 2A in Ohio

Another addition to my shack from MFJ

 

The Actual MFJ-929 sitting on top my Yaesu FT-840

So I went to Dayton Hamvention this year in search of an Autotuner. I was loaned a LDG AT-11MP version 1.0 from my long time friend and Elmer Bill (KA8VIT) I fell in love with autotuning.

and I know my buddy bill "Loves spinning knobs but I am really not a big fan. Bill's AT-11mp is great tuner. 

 LDG AT-11MP Version 1.0

But it is the 1.0 version. There is no more upgrade chips for the AT-11MP anywhere. I contacted LDG I contacted 3 different web referenced locations that used to have the upgrade kit and no one has it anymore. Too bad really. It is a great tuner. Having it have memories (the 1.0 version doesnt have any memory) and knowing that the upgrade gave it faster tuning made it a non starter for me. It also kind of soured me that LDG didnt carry that upgrade anymore. I know I know is that reasonable to think that a product 10+ years old needs to have an upgrade to it? I dont know this is Amateur Radio and I guess I have strange expectations. 

Anyhow I started off my quest and looked at the LDG product line. The immediate winner was LDG AT-100ProII. I wasnt going to buy one used (Amateur Radio used prices really dont make it worthwhile) I was looking for brand new. Retail price looked to be 199 before shipping and the BEST price I could find was on Cheapham for 186.00 of course there was going to be 10-20 for shipping. So I put it off until Dayton. I am going ANYHOW so why not pick it up there? Anyhow so I am at Dayton and camping at Buck Creek State park the day before. I just on a whim start looking for prices for the AT-100 Pro II. I still see the best price is 186. So I write that down so I can look tommorrow. I also looked at MFJ. I dont know why I did but I just did and then I found the MFJ-929. I was completely surprised. 

The MFJ was retail price 219. So right off the bat it was comparable to the LDG AT-100PRoII. Here is where it got interesting. The MFJ-929 is rated to 200 watts instead of 100-125 watts. What is the difference? Not much but it is nice to have that little bump in capacity. I dont ever think I will ever use more than 100 watts. I get done what I need to with 100 watts so, right now? Why bother? The list of features went on and on. More memories on every band. Handles random wire (little did I know this would become pointless in another day) It has a BIG LCD display on the front of it. It handles 2 antennas. It is a small attractive case! It is still MFJ however. I cant get that "Mighty Fine Junk" saying out of my head. I wrote the model down and wrote the retail price down too 219.00. I still was going to get the LDG but I figured I would have that for comparison. 

I set upon Hamvention with that in the back of my mind as my target. I did the whole walk through the outside vendor area and really didnt find anything I needed. I got bored with outside really fast. Aisles and Aisle of junk that should be in a landfill. I probably only looked down about 1/3 the outside flea market this year. I also scoured inside. I visited the MFJ booth. No specials there. I saw the tuner right there for 219.99 full retail price. No deals to be had at Hamvention. I looked at a few other familiar big retailers in the inside areas. Nothing. A lot of people said "We dont have any here in stock". I was about to leave for the day after scouring the inside vendors when I walked around a corner and saw something on a table. It was the MFJ-929 on the table of Ham World Inc. 

Ham World Inc Webpage

It was the only item on the table without a price. Here was that cool tuner. I picked it up and looked at it. Light, well made. Interesting looking. Ok, give it a try here. 

"Is this for sale?" 

"Sure is..." 

"Ok, what is the cash price" 

J.T. (N4ZDY) checks his list and comes back with a price almost instantly. "$175" he says. 

Look, I can play poker pretty well and some stuff can shock me and I can have a deadpan look on my face. I felt this though. My eyes popped out of my head. I launched into my pocket for my money clip. 

"Yeah, that is a pretty good price. I know" 

I guessed at this point he knew my face was excited. I grabbed my 200 and handed it over without even looking. 5 minutes later it was in my backpack which was strapped to my son.

In my haste I stated to doubt myself. 175... did I buy the RIGHT thing? I am not sure how many of you had that problem where you bought something QUICK that was a good price and it wound up being not what you thought? It hasnt struck me in a long time but I can remember about twice where that happen before. I opened up the backpack and saw the box. I put it in perfectly so the label was up. 

200 Watts - CHECK!

1.8 to 30 MHZ -- that is 160m to....wait where does 10m end? 28Hmz..(yeah I know I got a extra class license I shouldnt have to think this much about it. --- CHECK!

ok.. whew.. I bought the right thing.. 

That was a hell of a deal. I couldnt touch that anywhere online for that price. This is a relatively new tuner and it REALLY matches where I operate. 

Anyhow I get it back to the campsite and hook it up immediately. 

Then I stop. Ok electronic parts.. sort of expensive. Get a cup of coffee and get the manual out. 

There was a quick start guide in the manual so of course I read that. I was also ready to apply power to it. 

It fires to life and wow. 

I check all the antenna coax and key down on AM at about 5w. 

Bzzzttt boom 1.0 SWR. That was like seriously one second. Increased the power. The bar graph incremented right to where I would think the output should be. 

So I have about a week into this tuner and I love it. It had the classic MFJ problem. There was a screw that didnt fit in the hole and it was sideways. I was able to remove ALL the screws and manipulate the case so it

lined up better and I put the little metal screw back in. It looks fine. 

 The screw after being removed and lined back up. 

The customary MFJ new out of the box repair job.You do it once and then it lasts another 20 years

It works great too. Ive had no problems with the tuner for the past week. I have operated it off 12v battery power with my rig. Ive seen it where I have had some bad RF operating portable. I have defaulted it twice when moving the antenna. I didnt need to. It has memory banks for recording many different antenna configs. The tuner is so nice and fast. Who cares about all the memory locations and different ones PER antenna. Maybe someday that will come in handy.

 TL:DR I was about to buy a LDG AT-100ProII but I found a MFJ-929 for a great price. I love it and would recommend it to anyone who regularly runs 100 watts. 

New Camcorder should yield some great videos.

Finally got my first REAL HD camcorder. I tried one of those flip cameras from a Black Friday deal at best buy back about 3 years ago. I think I used that particular camera 4x before it just died. The battery worked fine the camera when you turned it on just didnt power up.

anyhow.. back to the JVC Everio Camcorder.  GZ-E200BUS.




And now I present my first time lapse video with it.

 

Not too bad for out a side window of my house. Through a dark screen and about 10 minutes after removing it from the box.  

A couple observations. 

1. Wow the sun goes down fast when it gets to a certain point. 

2. Didnt know the neighbor was going to cut the grass, sorry Mark. 

Not too bad for 150 dollars shipped off a random Woot.com deal.

My favorite "not so random wire" antenna and what I read to make it.

I have been using a random wire antenna for quite a while now. The first one I created was for Dayton Hamvention where my son and I camped at Buck Creek which is an Ohio State Park. At Buck Creek we threw up the antenna about 30 foot into a tree close to our camping site and with about a s2 noise level we had probably the best radio experience to date. Taking a look back at the geography of the area it is easy to understand why. The camping area is surrounded by lake on 3/4 sides and the whole camping area is about 30 foot above the land surrounding the camping sites. This almost entirely made up for the prevalence of Poison Ivy. 

That was the first experience with the "not so random wire" The second was field day. Same results here. The noise was higher being that we were down at the USS COD downtown Cleveland but we still got out fine and made plenty of contacts. The Ohio QSO party was done with the same random wire in my back yard operating "picnic table" portable. This "not so random wire" operated better than my 80m center fed dipole at the home. The location was the same but performance was now. This year we joined the Ohio State Parks on the air competition and activated Punderson. Another location just like Dayton Hamvention. The spot we picked was a good 500-600 foot above most of the surrounding area. So anyhow. because websites come and go I locked this stuff for my records. Here it is. The document I used to create the cheapest.. AND the best antenna I have ever used.

Here it is in play

Original post was here 

http://www.hamuniverse.com/randomwireantennalengths.html

The "Best" Random Wire Antenna Lengths 
Random wire lengths you should and should not use!

Updated 06-29-2012 

The random wire antenna is probably one of the least expensive, easiest and cheapest HF antennas to use if you have a tuner and you want to get the "most" out of a length of "random" wire without having to pull out that calculator, doing the math, getting the center insulator built or bought, running the feedline, and all the rest that goes with putting up a more elaborate antenna.
All you need for a random wire antenna is some wire, your tuner, one or more supports up as high as you can get them to string the wire from the supports to the tuner, at least one or two insulators and a little time.

One single wire, no solder connections, very simple.... all the way from the tuner to the end support. That's it in a nutshell.....or is it?

Many hams have tried till they are blue in the face to install the random wire antenna that works on most; if not all of the HF bands with terrible results.

Swr usually is all over the place and the tuner will just not do it's job. You can get good loading and low swr on sometimes 2 or 3 bands, but one or more of the bands that you want, just will not cooperate with an swr that can be adjusted with the "tuner".

So after much frustration..down it comes and you go on to a totally different type of antenna....all that time just wasted in your opinion.....until now!

We recently found some good information about random wire lengths that you should and should not use.

Jack, VE3EED, hopefully has solved a major headache we all have when we attempt to go thru the trial and error and frustration with getting the random wire to work where WE want it to work.

He knew that in order for the tuner to "see" a fairly low swr to work within it's range, that the antenna had to be NOT A HALF WAVE ON ANY FREQUENCY that we wanted to us, because a half wave will give us a very high impedance and the resulting swr into a 50 ohm transmitter!

So Jack took most of one day, did the math with the aid of his trusty calculator, several cups of coffee and came up with...............................

In Jack's own words....
"Here's the word on random-wire antennae."

Presented for your consideration by Jack, VE3EED.
The table below represents half wave lengths and multiples that you
DO NOT WANT TO USE!

You have to stay away from a half wavelength on any frequency.
Therefore, we came up with the following numbers to avoid (IN FEET):

These lengths in the table below are the culprits that cause all of the trouble when using random lengths.

Frequency MHz	1/2 Wave	2nd Multiple	3rd Multiple	4th Multiple
1.9	246	492	738	984
3.8	123	246	369	492
7.2	65	130	195	260
10.1	46	92	138	184
14.2	33	66	99	132
18.1	26	52	78	104
21.3	22	44	66	88
24.9	19	38	57	76
28.5	16	32	48	64

So those are the numbers above that we have to stay as far away from as possible when building a long-wire antenna.

Here they are in order:REVISED: 16 19 22 26 32 33 38 44 46 48 52 64 65 66 76 78 80 88 92 95 96 99 104 110 112 114 123 128 130 132 133 138 144 152 154 156 160 165 171 176 182 184 190 192 195 198 208 209 220 224 228 230 231 234 240 242 246 247 256 260 264 266 272 276 285 286 288 297 304 308 312 320 322 323 325 330 336 338 342 352 361 363 364 366 368 369 374 380 384 390 396 399 400 414 416 418 429 432 437 440 442 448 455 456 460 462 464 468 475 480 484 494 495 496.

Some of these numbers are too close to squeeze in between them.

Here are the final numbers (in my opinion) in green below that would be good for a long-wire antenna: (You may want to make a note of them)

REVISED: 29  35.5  41  58  71  84  107  119  148  203  347  407  423

REVISION NOTE:  We had a note from James, KB5YN, pointing out that one of my so-called GOOD numbers was 220 feet. That is the 10th multiple of a half wave on 15 meters. Well, I didn't think it would make any difference at that many multiples. However, the radio didn't tune up very well on 15 meters.

So, having nothing better to do one day, I re-did the calculations going out to 500 feet. That meant calculating all the way to 32 multiples of a half wave on 10 meters. I won't bore you with all that so the first portion of this still only shows up to the 4th multiple. There are so many new frequencies to stay away from, that it gets pretty tricky for the longer wires. However, the list has been revised and is good for wires as long as 500 feet.
73.... JACK, VE3EED

Dayton Hamvention 2013 - Buck Creek State Park

This year camping at Buck Creek State Park was fantastic the weather was 70 during the day and high 60s at night. Absolutely perfect.

Gave me an absolutely perfect time to operate portable in the best radio enviroment I have ever been in. S1 noise levels because if you look at the map. There is literally NOTHING around you there.

North American QSO Party.

This contest snuck up on my quite quickly. I didnt really know about it until the friday before when it was mentioned at my West Park Radio Ops Meeting. A contest! excellent. I figured I would go for it. No stress just an easy contest to do. I talked to my friend Mark NB8I and he was going to operate from his shack so I decided to go over and see what he was up to. When I got there I finally got to see it live. His Yaesu FT-950 his 50 foot tower and his beam antenna. What a cool setup. I took a video of him spinning the beam around. (This was totally staged by the way)

Now that was cool to see that in real life. It was intestesting to hear him operate too. He has the Yaesu Ft-950 and a bunch of other equipment too like the "LP-PAN" adapter. Now this thing was something cool. Something so cool that it makes me want to upgrade my rig now to get one of these. Basically it looked like the coolness of SDR without your rig being a featureless dumb metal box.

I am sorry that to me doesnt look like a radio. I dont like it. I wont buy it especially how expensive it is. However get a ft-950 and lp-pan and this is what you see

Look at that. How cool. So take your nice ft-950 and make it act like a SDR all for a couple hundred dollars. (The hardware is what costs the software is free) That was cool to see that. Now I can justify the need for a FT-950 in the future. Anyhow cool shack and some interesting equipment. Mark also is able to share comports with multiple devices. I tried the software on mine so I could use N1MM and HRD at the same time. I even got a special comport sharing software. None of it worked.

That is what I did after I left Mark's I was all enthusiastic about participating in the contest so I ran home with the new comport program idea and thinking I woudl be able to use N1mm to log the contest results and then HRD to control the rig.

I spent about 4 hours of contest time trying to mess with the program and it never wound up working the radio would send crazy data to N1MM and the frequency would go to .356 or something. Anyhow abandoned that project went straight N1MM and finished off the contest.

Final results for the North American QSO party was this.

QSO: 14000 PH 2012-08-18 2105 NA8Y            John       OH  NB8I            MARK       OH 
QSO:  7266 PH 2012-08-19 0054 NA8Y            John       OH  NT8Z            SCOTT      OH 
QSO:  7250 PH 2012-08-19 0056 NA8Y            John       OH  WW9R            PAT        WI 
QSO:  7270 PH 2012-08-19 0100 NA8Y            John       OH  N8BV            BRUCE      OH 
QSO:  7263 PH 2012-08-19 0101 NA8Y            John       OH  K4RO            TOM        TN 
QSO:  7254 PH 2012-08-19 0103 NA8Y            John       OH  KF4GDX          ROBERT     SC 
QSO:  7244 PH 2012-08-19 0106 NA8Y            John       OH  W9IMS           BILL       IN 
QSO:  7234 PH 2012-08-19 0108 NA8Y            John       OH  NW3H            BILL       PA 
QSO:  7229 PH 2012-08-19 0110 NA8Y            John       OH  WX3B            JIM        MD 
QSO:  7226 PH 2012-08-19 0114 NA8Y            John       OH  W0IW            JOE        IA 
QSO:  7223 PH 2012-08-19 0116 NA8Y            John       OH  K9CT            AL         IL 
QSO:  7203 PH 2012-08-19 0121 NA8Y            John       OH  NN3W            JACK       VA 
QSO:  7200 PH 2012-08-19 0122 NA8Y            John       OH  AB9H            JOE        IL 
QSO:  7197 PH 2012-08-19 0124 NA8Y            John       OH  K4YP            ED         NC 
QSO: 14283 PH 2012-08-19 0132 NA8Y            John       OH  NX5M            BOB        TX 
QSO: 14265 PH 2012-08-19 0136 NA8Y            John       OH  VE3PUX          JOHN       ON 
QSO:  7183 PH 2012-08-19 0146 NA8Y            John       OH  K0RH            JIM        KS 
QSO:  7192 PH 2012-08-19 0156 NA8Y            John       OH  NX5M            BOB        TX 
QSO:  7201 PH 2012-08-19 0200 NA8Y            John       OH  W4DXX           ERIC       GA 
QSO:  3779 PH 2012-08-19 0234 NA8Y            John       OH  WW9R            PAT        WI 
QSO:  3773 PH 2012-08-19 0236 NA8Y            John       OH  KS3D            JIM        DE 
QSO:  3824 PH 2012-08-19 0237 NA8Y            John       OH  VE3PUX          JOHN       OH 
QSO: 14264 PH 2012-08-19 0248 NA8Y            John       OH  W0BH            BOB        KS 
QSO: 14250 PH 2012-08-19 0411 NA8Y            John       OH  WO4DX           GARY       GA 
QSO: 14253 PH 2012-08-19 0415 NA8Y            John       OH  KL7RA           RICH       AK 
QSO: 14220 PH 2012-08-19 0451 NA8Y            John       OH  KK7PR           RALPH      OR 
QSO:  3802 PH 2012-08-19 0455 NA8Y            John       OH  WX3B            JIM        MD 
QSO:  3794 PH 2012-08-19 0503 NA8Y            John       OH  WB4OMM          STEVE      OH 
QSO:  3784 PH 2012-08-19 0511 NA8Y            John       OH  K0EA            TERRY      MN 
QSO:  3756 PH 2012-08-19 0515 NA8Y            John       OH  KK9V            MIKE       IN 
QSO:  3756 PH 2012-08-19 0516 NA8Y            John       OH  K4HTA           TED        VA 
QSO:  3756 PH 2012-08-19 0520 NA8Y            John       OH  KD9MS           CRAIG      IL 
QSO:  3756 PH 2012-08-19 0521 NA8Y            John       OH  WM9Q            RON        IL 
QSO:  3500 PH 2012-08-19 0527 NA8Y            John       OH  W8TM            PAUL       OH 
QSO:  3500 PH 2012-08-19 0528 NA8Y            John       OH  VE3KP           KEN        ON 
QSO:  3500 PH 2012-08-19 0530 NA8Y            John       OH  W8TOM           TOM        MI 
QSO:  3500 PH 2012-08-19 0535 NA8Y            John       OH  W9AV            CLINT      WI 
QSO:  3500 PH 2012-08-19 0536 NA8Y            John       OH  W0IW            JOE        IA 
QSO:  7000 PH 2012-08-19 0543 NA8Y            John       OH  K7RL            MITCH      WA 
QSO:  7000 PH 2012-08-19 0548 NA8Y            John       OH  N2BJ            BARRY      IL  

40 contacts only and
CLAIMED-SCORE: 1320

Not to shabby. Not my best performance but I had some fun. The dipole is really limiting me here. The noise level on 80 and 40 is really high.. sometimes as high as 20 over. I am not sure if that is where I live (inside the city) or some flaw with the antenna. I will have to figure that out here sometime soon.

APRS on the Cheap. My next project for the motorcycle.