Thursday, January 12, 2023

POTA with the CW Flea/Belka twins

I chose the wrong day (a weekday morning) and the wrong time to make this activation and will return on a weekend soon.

If I worked you - thanks for your great receive capabilities in divining my Flea-ish signal from the ether. 17 contacts were made, all on 20m with a 200mW output.

The Belka DX performed well, as expected.


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9 comments:

  1. Oh John... SO glad you got my message. Wasn't sure you'd hear me. But wanted to let you know I was listening. 73 OM. Great video and setup!

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    1. Yep, copied your entire transmission, Jim but only hit 'Record' on the smartphone after realizing it was you so I missed getting it all on video. Thanks for trying!

      73,
      John

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  2. I really enjoyed this footage. What you did here is way out of my comfort zone on so many levels (portable, battery pwr, QRP-p //the horror!//, separate RX and TX...). I've been wanting to do this too for a change but I never got around.
    Main issues: not too keen on dragging my K3 outside and having no decent portable power except for a fullblown 2kVA generator. I'd opt for 100W anyhow.

    Keep 'm coming and hope to work you soon. Enjoy!
    Franki

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    1. Hi Franki, QRPp can be an exercise in frustration for sure. As you might expect, things go smoother and are busier with 100W than even with 5 watts. Hopefully, I'll have a 20W rig arriving soon - maybe that'll be the sweet spot for convenience vs. activity generated. I do not belong to the "QRP as a religion" brigade and have no problem being QRO.

      I know you are a CW-addict - think of POTA as a "connection".

      73,
      John

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  3. Regarding the slow T/R turnaround time - I emailed Kevin and he suggested changing the value in line 56 of the open source code for the firmware. This number controls the T/R delay. I'm not an Arduino guy but was able to make my way thru it with Arduino IDE - but I get errors when trying to compile the edited version for upload to the radio. But for those of you so skilled, the problem is fixable.

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    1. John, did you get your compile problem solved? I ran into the same thing, and it just meant I needed to install a library in the IDE. Harry’s instructions for this are at the bottom of the flea docs page on Zachtek.

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    2. No, I didn't - I got sidetracked but I will give it another go after re-reading Harry's instructions.

      73,
      John

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  4. I would put a 5W amplifier at the output of this transmitter but I'm afraid of damaging the antenna input of my receiver (Malahite SDR). What do you think ? 73. Jo - F5NFB

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    1. Hi Jo - I think you should email Harry at ZackTek. You could also measure the output from the 'Receiver' SMA jack on the CW Flea when using it with the amp. In other words, no receiver attached yet for the measurement. You could do this with a tinySA, starting out with 20 or 30 dB of attenuation, then dialing down until you get a reading. This will tell you how much RF would be getting into the receiver. -53dBm is S9+20. If it exceeds that amount, it's probably best not to do it.

      73,
      John

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