QRP in the Driftless
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Oak Island expedition, day -1
8:45 local time, near dusk, overlooking the Madeleine Island ferry terminal. About 7 hours of driving up Highway 13 brought me to the Harbor’s Edge Motel in Bayfield, a lovely little town filled with cool stuff, including two bookstores; but everything but the restaurants and bars was unfortunately closed by the time I got in.…
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Oak Island, W9/WI-041 ATNO and K-0764, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore
Well, I’ve been hinting around it for long enough. The big activation that I have been planning is coming up rapidly, (maybe, even after all my planning, a little too rapidly)! It will be Oak Island; K-0764 and W9/WI-041, June 2nd and 3rd. I will be preparing this post over the next few days, to…
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I made a knee board
This is a great example of the kind of “just good enough to do the job” work that I do when I am in a big hurry; this whole thing took me one hour to make. First, how big to make it? A couple of minutes with a tape measure and (in this order) my…
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I made an “octopus”
I got a little scare a few weeks ago as I was setting up; the power cord for the 6100 was not in its usual location! I found it only seconds later, attached to the external battery, but it got me thinking about backup for critical parts of the station equipment. This is one of…
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No radio today, just a hike
Hiking has been taking the back seat a lot so far this year, in favor of radio operating, so when I looked at N0NBH’s solar conditions page and saw “poor” propagation in the forecast I decided to have a hike pure-and-simple! In the pre-dawn hours I filled one bottle with fresh hot coffee and a…
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X6100 and EFHW at Wildcat Mountain
The weather today was a lot more pleasant than when I last activated K-1480, but I was using the same equipment. I planned to trim a few inches from the QRPguys EFHW to improve the SWR while I was setting up but it seemed to have the opposite effect … now I am wondering what…
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Devil’s Lake State Park, K-1449 and Ice Age National Scenic Trail, K-4238
After a weekend of chilly and rainy weather there came a day where the forecast promised slightly nicer conditions, and I had scouted out this location a few weeks earlier on a trip to the Menard’s in Baraboo. I got there early and considered operating outdoor portable for the first time this year, but a…
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It was snowing lightly on Wildcat Mountain …
as I worked 24 hunters this morning at Wildcat Mountain State Park, K-1480. It drizzled all night, on & off, it was still drizzling as I loaded the car and drove to the park; as I was unwinding the antenna wire I saw the first few snowflakes. There was a brief period of snow pellets,…
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New battery!
My 3 amp-hour Bioenno LiFePO4 battery has been giving me great service so far, but I am planning a multi-day POTA + SOTA activation in a wilderness location that will be 100% pack-in-everything-you-want-or-need. (More about this during May!) Based on my experience so far, an average activation of an hour or two on the air…
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Finishing that antenna
I really hate to lose momentum on a project, but that was more-or-less happening with the short base-loaded whip antenna I was making after the pattern of the QRPguys DS1; the mounting wasn’t going to fit on the tripod head, so I ordered new copper clad board (G10 this time), and for no reason, the…
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Making a common-mode choke
Over the winter I bought a couple of different EFHW antenna kits, not all of which are assembled yet. (More about these in the weeks & months to come!) I have been wishing for a common-mode choke to work with them because of all the stories that one reads about RF-on-the-coax-shield interfering with the operation…
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Wildcat Mountain, K-1480, again
On the roll from Monday’s more-than-successful semi-spontaneous activation at Dell Creek SWA, today I dropped in at Wildcat Mountain State Park while I was in the neighborhood. It was a beautifully springlike day here in the Driftless Area, or at least it evolved into one from the sorta-wintery overnight … I was actually in shirtsleeves…
A backwater of the Mississippi River in the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge on a gloomy, chilly day in early November, viewed from the Lower Diversion Dike Trail.
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