Went camping, set up a portable HF station

[Moleculo]

I went camping in the RV this last weekend and set up a portable HF station. I took a few pics, but then my camera went kaput before I finished . Not pictured is the UMPC computer and rig interface where I did some PSK-31 work.

Here are few pics:

Yaesu FT-897d with SuperAntenna MP1 that has been modified with extra ground radials and a 12 foot telescoping whip attached to a roll up table:

Here is a picture of how the antenna is mounted to the roll up table. The stock radials are 4, 3 wire flat wires that are too short. I added 4 more 2 wire flat radials, which really has helped the antenna considerably:

Here's how the modified antenna tunes up on 20 meters (and below):

With the 12' whip, you don't need nearly as much coil to load up 40m:

I'll post up some lessons learned from the PSK-31 portable work later. I'm off to see my grandfather.

 

[Quiksilver]

Very cool!!

 

[Sonwatcher]

Looks good ! What did you use for power ? I have seen some guys use a lithium battery. Not sure where you get those packs.

 

[Moleculo]

There's a vendor that sells at the local electronics swap meets that has those lithium-ion batteries. At this site we had regular 110v power, so that wasn't an issue. I have the internal power supply option on the 897d. If I didn't have 110v, I would have run the DC power hook-ups to the RV battery bank, which I've done before.

At this particular campground, they won't let you put anything up in the trees. I had with me a homemade shortened dipole with 80m load coils (you might have seen an earlier thread) and a lot of ladder line, but I couldn't put it up in the trees. No big deal since I can use this little antenna and still have fun. Mother nature was not cooperating with me Saturday so it took me all day trying to finally make a 20m contact. By late afternoon I was able to make a few 40m contacs around the western U.S.

PSK-31 also didn't cooperate early on. The 20m band just wasn't working well enough for a station with such a small antenna. However, I did manage a brief Alaska contact and later a Georgia contact on 40m.

Here are the lessons learned on trying the digital stuff portable; I encountered a few problems that I hadn't run into before: First, my UMPC with a roll-up keyboard didn't work out. The problem was that the USB keyboard kept locking up. When you're using the touchscreen on the UMPC to "auto CQ", you don't notice that the keyboard is locked up until someone calls you back and all of the sudden you can't type I later solved this by wrapping the cord around a ferrite toroid a couple of times. However once that problem was solved, I discovered that the roll up keyboard gave real bad RFI on 40m while attached to the UMPC. It was bad enough that it affected the waterall and you could hear the RFI on the speakers. I later swapped out the UMPC for a full fledged notebook computer, although that also gave me bad RFI when plugged into the USB Rigexpert Standard interface. I'm sure it was just a ground loop of some type, but isn't one of the reasons why you use a commercial interface because they're supposed to isolate the rig from the PC? As a result, I'm going to try a few different things to see if I can clear this problem up, but it certainly wasn't as simple as it should have been.