Category Archives: Station

Portable at the Beach

by

0

As you may know I face a lot of QRM from home with usually around S8 of noise on all bands. This is why I try to do portable at the beach as often as I can.

The location is around 2h30 drive from my home QTH. The benefits of this location is that there is absolutely no noise when beamed towards the sea from around 80 degres to 200 degres.

The noise goes up to S5/7 while beaming towards Europe.

My working conditions when I am portable are:

  • Yaesu FTDX 10
  • SPE Expert 1.3K-FA (running usually around 600/700w)
  • BuddiHex Hexbeam @ 7m above the ground
  • Begali Sculpture Key
  • Heil Pro Elite 6

From this location I am able to discover real radio again, it is crazy to see how bands seems to be opened while at home it feels like they are always closed just because of noise. Without all this noise I can see that there is a lot of DX to work and it feels really like being in a different area. Pile ups seems bigger also due to the fact that I hear more stations with the low noise.

I will be portable again on 17th until 19th November.

Nano Keyer

by

0

I recently purchased a Nano Keyer from Alibaba. It cost me around US$50 and was delivered after around 25 days from purchase in Vietnam.

It is cheaper than a Winkeyer or Microham devices which also include a Winkeyer.

After unpacking it I installed it, it is pretty straight forward. One USB-C connected to the computer and the jack 3.5 from the Nano Keyer to the Key plug of the radio and finally my Begali Sculpture plugged into the Nano Keyer.

To change the settings of the Nano Keyer it is a bit painful as we need to pass commands with the cw keyer but once understood it works well.

The only thing which bothers me a little is that the side tone is not really strong thus if a bit of noise around it is hard to hear the side tone. Anyway for the price it works quite well and is also having a very small foot print.

Happy with the purchase and using it quite often, for portable operation it will also be very easily transportable thus I recommend for the ones who want to operate portable with such a device.

I had no issues at all to connect to it with Log4OM, N1MM as well as Cloudlog but Cloudlog is still having bugs with the Winkeyer so it is not really usable.

The change of speed directly from Log4OM or N1MM works also very well.

Station

by

0

Following our vacation in France in July 2022 I was able to buy some Ham Radio stuff and bring it back with me. I bought two dipoles and a SunSDR2 DX as well as a DX Commander Classic.

I did put up the dipole on a Spiderbeam Fiberglass pole of 12m and mounted the DX Commander Classic in the garden.

The station is now looking as per the below picture