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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5 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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