KJ7DJR Amateur Radio

Sometimes, going backwards a bit can make you really appreciate the newer versions of communications methods. such has been my experience the last couple of days working with RTTY, or Radio Tele-Type on the digital modes.

Previously my only experience in the digital HF bands has been with FT8 and FT4 modes. While getting the radio setup with SignaLink was a little messy at first, the operation and decoding of signals in FT8 and FT4 is pretty clean.

And by clean, I mean that when you decode, or are heard by another station, pretty much what you sent is what gets heard.

Not so with RTTY!

OH MY GOSH! I have never waded through so much garbled, half heard, constant noise on FT8 or FT4 as I was treated to with today’s RTTY Roundup contest.

Pulling Teeth, Ow! Ow! Yes sir this is fun! Can’t You Tell from my Grimace?!

From butchered call signs, to CQs that come out as OQs, 599 signal reports that read as #599, and state locations I can’t identify. Wow that is tough to figure out what is going on!

Really makes you appreciate FT8’s clockwork accurate decoding, and understand why so many newer hams love it.

Can you believe FT8 has only been around since 2017?

But enough kvetching… I did learn some valuable things the last couple days while getting into RTTY (With the help of my favorite Elmer)

Eh? What did you Say? AGN? AGN?

With RTTY, there is a lot more customization of what you can say to another station. This is primarily done through the use of Macros, which let you save your own canned messages that can be of some length.

This is apparently one of the reasons why FT8, as popular as it is, is usually not deemed suitable for Field Day contests. Field Day is more about Emcomms, which though not impossible on FT8 is pretty darn difficult with a tiny character limit and 15 second alternating intervals to work with.

So to take advantage of the flexible messaging capabilities of RTTY, while coping with the extreme “garble factor”, most hams doing RTTY use repetition in their macros to try to make it so you can peer at it and figure out more or less what was said even with all the junk added.

For example, a CQ call might transmit CQ CQ RU de KJ7DJR de KJ7DJR AZ AZ RU.

At least one of the call signs in the message will usually decode properly, making it possible to get an answer back. Ditto with the CQ and the location.

(I’m guessing the skill and “spider sense” to figure it out will develop with more experience in this mode, kind of like seeing those images in stereograph dot pictures can be learned. But right now it’s a headache for a still rather green ham.)

And then, just when I’ve gotten used to RR73 and R-10, there are the new abbreviations I’ve never seen before, like QRZ? and AGN?

QRZ? I had to ask about? My first guess was it might be a request to confirm the QSO in QRZ! But apparently in RTTY that means, “did you copy me?”.

Now.. AGN? I got the gist of after seeing it just a couple times by different hams. And actually it spurred a 25-year-old memory and made me laugh.

My ex-father in-law had a little habit of pranking people in conversations anytime someone mentioned hearing, heard, or being deaf. He’d say “Eh?” and pretend not to hear you, making you repeat it till you caught on that he was smirking over there, and just waiting to see how many times it would take you. What a stinker!

“AGN? AGN? EH? EH? “

Funny how different parts of your life suddenly reach out and shake hands in ironic ways!

The Catapult Being Loaded For New Ham Adventures

One of the good things about getting over the RTTY entry hurdle today is that it will make it easier to move on to PSK31, and Olivia, which I had gotten disgusted with trying to understand for emmcomms, and taken a rather loooooong break from.

So today I’m a better, more versatile ham than I was yesterday, and I’ll get even better soon.

This is truly a deep hobby, with something else to learn all the time!

Can you believe I’ve been a ham for three years now already?

Hey, No time to get bored! I’m off to tumble down another rabbit hole after the white rabbit and his pocket watch! (For syncing up his FT8 clock no doubt!)

New ham adventures ahead! Cut the rope and Bombs away! Green hams are inbound, watch your head!

Just when you think you know a fellow ham, after hanging out together for a couple years over radios, nets, propagation and antenna chatter, lunches and breakfasts at Denny’s, or Village Inn, you find out that they have a second secret life as a weatherman. (You know who you are, NWF! =)

This is particularly shocking since this is the same ham who routinely razzes me about being a budding meteorologist over my investigations of how the weather conditions, storms, and droughts affect propagation, or the lack of it. Yet never a peep about his own weather tracking project did I hear!

In fact it took a total teardown and rebuild of his home base amateur radio shack to bring this secret life out of the shadows!

After he finally got himself back on the air, I guess he had a little creative fix-it juice remaining, so he got himself a new piece of “kit” to replace his old one.

The Speed of Creativity Accelerated

Modern life can be so interesting, with new things being invented, and springing up around us at hypersonic speed while we aren’t looking. I have this experience over and over again with my programming adventures, and technology generally.

I’ll be busy just working, creating, maintaining projects of my own, and turn around to find the system equivalent of New Rome built while my back was turned.

“When did all this happen??!” I’ll exclaim as I put on my running shoes to try to catch up.

In my friend’s case, I’ve been ambushed with the sudden revelation that there is a whole network of ordinary people generating “ambient” weather data all over the world using “PWS” or Personal Weather Stations on porches and patios all over the place.

I had just assumed most of that data came from airports, courthouses, bus stations, and other public facilities, but it seems that a significant portion of that data is crowd sourced!

Tracking Santa =)

A few links to track the local conditions of the “secret weatherman”… just think of this as Santa’s Sleigh Radar 😉

https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/KAZCHAND560

https://ambientweather.net/dashboard/287341175e41b820e9301b36dbf52b95

I had the chance to attend a pretty neat presentation at a ham club in Mesa earlier today on building “flying saucer antennas” for the HF bands. (I took both my Technician and General tests at this club in 2019, and they are a terrific bunch of mostly retired folks with the amateur radio bug.)

These antennas are pretty cool little things because they seem to work pretty well, yet are very compressed in space requirements.

They are sort of like the capacitive hats you can get for the upper part of your vertical antennas, and are another type of loading coil, but being placed at the top of an antenna instead of in the middle like most coils, don’t reduce the circulating current above the coil.

One other problem this particular design solves is the issue of interturn capacitance, which in a completely flat planar coil setup can be quite severe. This design avoids that excessive capacitance by “basket-weaving” the coils over and under a series of spokes. (They remind me of the “star” Christmas ornaments we used to make with colored string woven onto popsicle sticks when I was a kid.)

The presentation included some live examples the presenter had built for different HF bands. The longer wave-length bands were, of course, larger in total diameter, and had more windings on the spokes, but compared to a huge half-wave dipole were quite compact.

The presenter uses a vertical shaft of just 14″, and a mag-mount with the flying saucer “hat” on his car to work HF bands from 6m to 160m (Depending on the hat used.)

Now I was thinking they would also be a terrific apartment antenna. (I like my hamsticks, but 30m is the longest wavelength I’ve worked so far. I use a Wolf-River Coil mounted at the window for 40m.)

Here are a couple of links to articles I found online about this type of antenna “resonator”.

• http://play.fallows.ca/wp/radio/ham-radio/flying-saucer-resonator-build/ This fellow 3D-printed his hub pieces instead of cutting them out of some stiffer plastic. Sounds like my kind’a thing!
• http://marac.org/roadrunner/1006rr.pdf (Start reading on page 12 of the PDF)

I’ve been watching weird behavior in propagation over the western USA with curiosity since Hurricane Ida plowed through some weeks ago.

And I’ve been taking screen shots of how the hole in propagation has changed and expanded over time since then.

Early Summer “Normal Propagation”

When I first started on the HF bands back in May, the skip zone around me was a pretty standard 350-550 miles. That left most of the USA accessible to me most of the time, and was pretty consistent for several months.

There were a couple of little “signal black holes” that were hard to get into– Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas were just random luck but I eventually got them!

A Turning Point Blows in on the Wings of a Storm

But Ida seemed to mark a turning point where the skip zone started to enlarge gradually. Now the skip zone I see most days is 1200-2000 miles, and covers MORE than HALF of the USA.

I did a spot check of other western grids signal propagation a few days ago to see if it was just Arizona experiencing this issue, and I found that most of the grids I checked in the western half of the USA were seeing a similar sized huge hole in HF band propagation around themselves.

What the heck was causing it? I’m curious about everything, of course, so I’ve been trying to figure it out. (Even more so because it’s causing me problems working for various awards!)

I’ve pored over many different maps, looking for a factor that seems to match the “hole” in the sky I am seeing, and I’ve finally found one that looks close.

It’s a map of the severe drought conditions developing in the USA.

Here’s a map of drought conditions back in late May, when I first started doing HF.

So I have a new theory, which may or may not be accurate in whole or part.

It looks to me as if moisture in the air is an important part of the propagation puzzle by refracting the signals back downward. This also explains why I frequently see signals land on the coasts of land masses, where the moisture content of the air changes abruptly.

I’ve seen this with Asia, Europe, South America, and propagation into Europe pretty regularly.

My friend is starting to call me “The Meteorologist” with all this weather investigation! But isn’t it interesting!!

Space weather is interesting to hams because the “mood” of the sun affects ham radio in all kinds of interesting ways.

From creating the different layers of the ionosphere that bounces HF waves back to earth and makes communications possible, to disrupting those same waves with geomagnetic storms, to sunspots cycles affecting the day to day propagation conditions.

Abd then there are the CME’s.. (Coronal Mass Ejections), which is where a big arm of plasma is tossed off the surface of the sun out into space.

Much of the time, these fire harmlessly in a direction other than right at us, but a few days ago a CME fired right at us. It took a couple of days to travel and start to smack the earth, but this morning in the early AM, that arm of energy finally struck the planet.

Among the effects that were noted of this CME were:

• Aurora Borealis appearing in the skies much further south than normal, including parts of Oregon, Wyoming, Iowa, Minnesota and Michigan.
• A huge decrease in signal propagation in the HF bands.
• Fluctuations in the power grid strength

Add a Bizarre Wind Over Mesa

Another potential effect that I suspect was caused by the incoming CME happened last night.

A pretty hefty wind came up around 8pm and started rattling the windows. This lasted HOURS, into the early morning, but without rain, thunder, or clouds of any kind.

Now I’m a watcher of patterns– I notice things that are different from what usually happens and this wind struck me as weird because it didn’t follow the pattern I’m used to.

The reason I found it weird is that there was no accompanying thunderstorm, and it lasted a long time.

Usually when the windows start to rattle like that, thunderclouds, lightening, and heavy monsoon type rains are not far behind. I also usually hear sort of an echoing quality in the sky, as if all the sound is being trapped close to the earth and bounced around. Landing jets approaching the area airports sound like they are really close, for example.

That’s always my que to pull in the antennas before it storms.

But we didn’t get a drop of rain! And the windows were still rattling at 3am non-stop. (And no, it was not a haboob hitting. There was no dust, and haboobs around here typically last only an hour or two around sundown.)

Teeny Tiny Fifteen Meter Signal Report Pictures

The sky also seemed visually weird this morning– maybe it was just me, or the start of fall, but the light seemed misty looking. Like there had been a fog that was still burning off.

After a while, I put the antennas back out and climbed onto my fifth HF band for the third day. (My friend, Norm, picked up a 15m hamstick for me while he was at HRO last week and gave it to me on Saturday at lunch.)

What I saw on my signal reports was interesting but made a lot of sense considering the amount of coronal mass energy the earth’s magnetic field had just deflected and was still roiling with.

Here are a few of the screenshots showing how little propagation was happening today:

Good Contacts Even with Bad Conditions

Surprisingly, I actually made a fair number of contacts today, including in South America in spite of the terrible conditions.

There were just a tiny number of stations on the band activity each FT8 cycle, and so I think we were all desperate to work any station we could see and pounced hard! (Lol).

I had to use more power than usual also– I rarely run at or above 50w with my 100w radios, but today I had to go to 50w and beyond to complete a few QSO’s. Signal strength I received from stations during the course of the exchange was also fluttering all over the place rapidly.

Space weather was never so interesting when I wasn’t trying to work around it!

A while ago I wrote about the propagation phenomenon I was seeing around the time Ida was hammering the gulf coast states– namely that there wasn’t much propagation to be had in the western states or east of the center of the country. Signals simply weren’t landing where they used to at all, and the whole area seems barren of propagation.

As Ida faded, the situation improved somewhat for a couple of weeks– I was able to start getting a few of the states in the west from time to time in the mornings.

But as time has passed, I’ve been seeing that huge hole in the propagation patterns get larger again. Ida is long gone, so I’m not sure what is causing the effect. But it’s getting harder and harder to reach anyone out west on most of the HF bands I typically work.

Now granted, my “long” history of watching the signal reports only tracks back to May of this year, but this is a far different pattern than what I’ve been looking at before Ida.

Investigating the Western Propagation Anomaly

I got curious whether it was only me having the issue with my less than optimal antenna situation, or if the same huge hole in the propagation patterns was being experienced by others in the western states also.

So I decided to go back to PSK Reporter and run a few searches to see where other hams in states like Nevada, Utah, Colorado, California, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Texas etc. were seeing their signals land.

PSK Reporter offers searches per grid square, but they are limited to signals sent in the last 15 minutes. This means I’d be more likely to find someone transmitting in the last 15 minutes from a grid square with a big population.

So I pulled up Grid Tracker and turned on the grid square numbered overlay.

By Zooming in, I could see the larger cities in the western states and pick out the grid squares they were located in for my search.

For instance, most of Las Vegas is in DM26.

I chose 17m as the band because it’s a good daytime band.

San Diego, California Area Signal Report

Salt Lake City, Utah Signal Report

Seattle Washington Area Signal Report

Denver/Colorado Springs Area Signal Report

Dallas Texas Signal Report

Las Vegas Nevada Signal Report

Patterns, Conjecture, Questions…

I know these are just one days worth of screenshots of where signals are being reported landing in a span of an hour or two, but they generally represent the same pattern I’ve been seeing since Hurricane Ida.

Namely, a HUGE skip distance around the point of origin, where there is almost nothing landing, and then a tight dense signalfall just beyond that margin all the way to the eastern seaboard. There are always a couple local signal reports, but then nothing for 1500-2000 miles!

I’ve spent a little time looking at various types of weather reports, looking for a matching visual pattern that might give me a clue what the cause of this very odd, unusual pattern is, but so far have not been able to find anything that screams, “It’s MEEeeeeee me me me!”

I’ve looked at barometric pressure, humidity, wind direction to name a few.

And I kinda wonder how many other hams are noticing it.

Propagation IS weird, but this seems a little too big a change to last so long without some sort of important factor causing it.

There is an award on QRZ that I’ve been on the verge of getting for a couple of months, but the final accomplishment on the list seemed nearly impossible with my current humble hamstick setup.

I needed to make confirmed contacts on at least SIX continents to get the Continents of the World Award, and the final hurdle was the African continent.

The closest I had ever really gotten was a signal report out of the Canary Islands, located off the coast of Morocco. But 17m really turns out to be a nice DX band.

I got a hint last week that I might be able to actually get the African Continent when I saw a signal report hit smack in the middle of that body– in Kenya.

Unfortunately, there were no stations that I could hear broadcasting at the time out of the area. But I chalked it up as an omen from the ionosphere that I could actually catch it someday.

And then I got a nibble the following week from a station in the Canary Islands– I had them by the toe! —but the communication dropped before it could be completed. OOh! So close!!

Today in the middle of the afternoon I started seeing a station from the Madiera Islands popping up on 17m in FT8. I had no idea where that actually was, but it sounded interesting.

Now you see them, now you don’t– we played hide and seek for around 2 hours as they popped up, vanished, popped up, disappeared… and I finally figured out where they heck they were– sitting just a little further west of the Canaries. Lo and behold, I had signals landing there off and on.

And then, in the late afternoon we finally met in the middle and completed a contact! Even better, the station confirmed almost immediately!

Worked All Continents Awarded

It almost feels like cheating, to count an island a few hundred miles off the coast as “Africa”. Really it’s just a nibble! But it counts! Bwahahaha!

Gloating aside, I guess they classify Madiera Island, which is an autonomous region belonging to Portugal, as Africa because it’s actually sitting on the same tectonic plate as the African Continent.

But it still feels a little like breaking a piece of gingerbread off the “house” in the forest and eating it, like Hansel and Gretel. 🙂

A DX Kind of Day

DX seemed particularly easy today on 17 even beyond the exciting chase of “Africa”.

Today’s DX haul also included:

• Belize (Been chasing this guy FOR-Ever.)
• Chile (x2)
• Venezuela
• Japan (x2)
• Canada (x4)
• Spain
• Us Virgin Islands

I had a total of 55 17m contacts today, including a bunch more states for WAS on 17m. (I currently have 32 states, plus 5 more worked but not confirmed.)

I also logged my 1600th contact in total today since starting on HF at the end of May. That’s a lot of radio time!

In public school for most kids, geography always comes off as a dull subject. One of memorizing states, and state capitols, and peering at a bland globe at far off places that never really captures the interest of most students. Yeah, that was me too–guilty as charged!

If public schools really wanted students to enjoy geography, they should sit students down with a ham radio and get them making contacts.

I’ve been relearning geography in a much more interesting way since I started DXing a bit, and even places closer to home become more interesting when you spot your signal landing there, or make a contact with a real person. I think this is because it gives the brain an extra little marker to hang the dry facts on so they become meaningful.

As I’ve witnessed with elderly relatives now passed on, who’s short term memory decays, but they still remember things with emotional attachment long into their decline, memory is in many ways an emotional activity.

Last night while working FT8 on 40m I ran into a fun little place off to the right of Greenland where my signal reports were landing for the first time.

I zoomed in, but it had no name on the map other than the name of one town, Longyearbyen. Huh.

So I sent my Elmer a screenshot. “Where in the WORLD is THIS?”

A half hour or so later he sent back a reply. “That’s Svalbard”

Ah! I remembered he had mentioned a couple months earlier making a contact with a ham in a place by that name himself. So THAT is Svalbard!

Apparently this far north island is actually a part of Norway, though it looks to me like it’s closer to Greenland.

The Long Year Town

And the name of the town, Longyearbyen translates to the Long Year Town. It’s the most northern settlement of more than 1000 people in the world, and “enjoys” several months of solar darkness, as the tilt of the earth keeps it facing away from the sun part of the year.

Apparently it once was a coal mining town.

A tourist information page about the town proudly gives the following information about living in Longyearbyen:

• There are separate “roads” in the town centre for snowmobiles
• We only have one grocery store
• We are used to living next door to reindeer
• We still take off our shoes when we enter hotels and restaurants, a tradition that has arisen from the problem with coal dust in the old days.
• All the mining infrastructure is protected and remains as surreal monuments in and around the settlement.
• The streets in Longyearbyen have numbers instead of names.
• Longyearbyen has a university centre with 300 students, all of whom must learn to use firearms.
• Seeing whales swimming in the fjord from our lounge window is not an uncommon occurrence.
• Polar bears roam the landscape so people always go armed when they leave the settlement.

The ham station there that I saw receiving my signal report is JW4PUA— have a look at that proper Norwegian face on his QRZ profile!

He’s conservator working in the Svalbard Museum, and lives in a cabin just outside town. From his comments he’s piled upon the second he sets foot on the air, because there aren’t many hams out there.

He reports a couple of other interesting facts. Not only do they have 4 months of total darkness, there is an opposing 4 months of midnight sun in Svalbard, and they are located halfway between Norway and the North Pole– a whopping 1000km away from mainland Norway.

There are around 2000 people total living and working in the town.

Another Round of 2am Japanese Takeout and Other Assorted Contacts

Other things I got up to last night on 40– (yawn, stayed up wayyyyy tooo late!)

Chased and caught a station in Australia.

Chased and didn’t catch several stations in Costa Rica.

Chased and caught 6 stations in Japan, including several of the calling areas I didn’t already have.

Japan is divided into calling areas, and the number in the call sign seems to indicate which one they are in. I previously had four of them, but there is an eQSL award for snagging all ten that I am working on.

Chased and caught a few more grids– I just need 10 more grids for the Grid Squared Award on 40m now.

Completed and was awarded the eNorthAmerica award on eQSL.

Now it’s time for a nap. I really gotta quit staying up so late, but it’s hard when there are leaping hams everywhere. 🙂

I don’t know why I see these little stories in my head to explain how an experience “feels”, but I can only describe yesterday’s fun on 17 meters as a rush of butterflies and chasing a field full of them all over the place while laughing gleefully.

Which one to chase first?! Oh! that one is from New York, and that one is from Switzerland, and look at the one from Bolivia! There were just so many.

I detailed earlier the work I did to get the 17m hamstick to tune more or less properly on my new heavier quad-mount for the window.

But that work took me well into the evening and I was not able to test the propagation of that antenna till the following day.

So the following morning I completed the connections to the radio, hung out the counterpoise wire below the antenna, and got cringing, turned on the radio.

Oh. My. Word.

Now I like 20m generally, it’s busy, and easy to work when open. But I have NEVER seen as a much traffic from all over the world scrolling up the band activity screen in WSJT-X at once even on 20, as I saw when I tuned over to 17m for the first time.

I could hardly read the call signs before they scrolled up off the screen, there were so many.

It kept me glued to the laptop and radio for nearly the whole day!

My Butterfly Collection… er.. Results 🙂

Over all, I got 45 contacts in one day– a personal best.

I contacted 17 states, 14 of which have confirmed already.

I cleared my 500th US county, and grabbed 24 grids on 17m, plus 19 confirmed towards the World Radio Friendship award for the 17m band.

It was a good day for DX for me also, including Alaska, Chile, Brazil, France, Canada, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.

I also spent happy hours chasing New Zealand, Germany, Austria, Italy, Costa Rica, Belize, and Switzerland to name a few. Though the stars didn’t align to allow me to actually CATCH them yesterday, I have faith that will happen on 17m eventually (because you can’t catch stations you can’t hear, and I could finally hear them).

Anyway– let’s just say I had more fun than I can remember in a while. 🙂

“Old Mc-Lisa had a farm, ee-eye-ee-eye-oooh!“

Yet Another Antenna Project

As I have previously detailed, my 3rd floor apartment is pretty hard to ham from. I’ve hacked a few solutions that have allowed me to work about three bands so far, though I can only work two at a time due to space constraints.

It’s a bit of a pain in the neck to disconnect and haul in one antenna on it’s plank mount, so I can hang out another, or have to unscrew one hamstick from the mount just to swap bands.

I’d really like to spend more time operating on the air than constantly having to jimmy different rigs into place!

Antenna Farming for Small Spaces

With that concern in mind I’ve started work on another project– a “square foot antenna farm” of four hamstick mounts on one bracket, two closer to the building side by side, and two pushed another 6 inches further out.

My intention is to have four different hamsticks packed into a space that is about a foot square. I hope to have 40m, 30m, 20m, and 17m available at one time, though obviously only one will be transmitting at a time.

This creates new challenges–

• For example, the mounting board needs to be wider, and thus heavier
• The bracket hardware needed to hold four sockets are also heavier
• All antennas are sharing a common ground, which could create loops or parasitic interaction between antennas
• All of the above makes the whole assembly heavier to lift and place in the window
• Different length radials needed for each antenna
• Bigger mass of metal in the mounting hardware majorly changes the tuning of the antennas and may require a tuned counterpoise dropping down below the mount out the window.

So there’s a lot to work out.

Here are a few photos of the project in progress:

The hardware above is built using a pair of L-brackets and a pair of flat strap hardware extension pieces from Lowes, and a pair of Workman dual antenna mounts, bolted across the L brackets. Washers are used under the top bolts to give the mount a little tilt to allow the antenna whips to clear the roofline of the building.

I add the self-adhesive weather-stripping, which I get in rolls, to the vertical sides of the board to seal any gaps between the boards or the sliding window pane. It does a respectable job of forming around the jumper coax cables where they pass to the interior.

As the mounting plank gets heavier with all the extra brackets and 4 times as many antennas, the risk of dropping the whole thing out of the window increases, so I added a pair of “gate handles”, also purchased at Lowes to the back.

I’ve actually considered this for the previous, smaller mounts– sometimes they are awkward to move, or pry sideways in the window frames channel so I can take one of them back out of the window or check the cables. I had one incident where I did nearly lose my grip on one of the antennas while putting it out which gave me a little mini-heart attack!

But this mount is just so heavy it’s a necessity.

Because I have radials actually taped to the inside of the wall running around part of the room, I needed the radials to be easy to connect and disconnect quickly.

Anderson Power Pole connectors accomplish this nicely, and connect to the antennas via one of the mounting bolts for the L-brackets.

Note how the cables pass between the weatherstripping on the boards easily. I’ve pretty much abandoned the use of the MFJ-Feedthrough panel as this works fine.

The cables are shown wrapped a few times in snap-on ferrites that act as chokes, but I have since move them a little closer to the antenna feedpoints, and outside of the window instead of inside.

Taming the Tuning of 17m

I admit I’ve been taking a break from this project for a couple of weeks, partly because the prospect of having toe go around in circles for hours, tuning and re-tuning four different antennas, all interacting with each other is a bit daunting.

I initially took my well tuned 20m hamstick from the original mounting plank and put it on the new quad mount to see what I had. The SWR on that was just ridiculous– somewhere between 20:1 and infinite! Yiikes!

All that extra metal on the quad-bracket definitely changed where resonance lands. I threw up my hands and put it back on the old mount for a while. Ugh.

A friend suggested adding a hanging counterpoise wire of 10 or so feet right at the feedpoint of each antenna might allow tuning to a more acceptable SWR.

So after installing the 17m hamstick I have onto the mount tonight, and working with adjusting the whip length, and adjusting the radial length till I got as low SWR as I could, I attached a counterpoise wire to the nearest bolt on the mount and tossed it out the window.

I played with the length by rolling up and unrolling the wire at the free end for a while, and eventually got the SWR down to just under 2:1 for 17m.

I’m not sure I can get it much better, but tomorrow, I’ll see what the Icom 7300’s antenna tuner can do with the antenna as is.

Interestingly, the really narrow, sharp dip you normally see with a hamstick in the SWR scan is now a very broad, shallow curve across the whole band.

It remains to be seen whether that’s a good thing, or not, but I guess I get to find out in the morning!