Foundations of Amateur Radio

The other weekend there was an amateur radio contest on. Not surprising if you realise that's true for most weekends. For a change, I knew about this contest before it started, because I missed out a year ago, so I did the smart thing to add it to my diary with an alert a month out.

In this particular contest there's points to be made by being a so-called roving station, that is, one that moves around during the contest and in the past that's how I've participated and had lots of fun. So the die was cast and a plan was concocted.

Being a rover meant that I would be outfitting my car with my radio. It's been out of the car for several years, taken out when we had the transmission replaced, and never actually returned. I started making lists of everything I'd need, including learning that you can use a bench top power supply to charge a 12V battery if your trusty charger has let the smoke out. I went hunting for the cable that connects the front of the radio to the back and realised that it was still in the car, so I could cross that off my checklist.

I decided for the first time that realistically I could log using paper and save myself the heartache of finding a computer with a suitable battery and matching software, especially since I'd be operating with low power so making a gazillion contacts wasn't going to be a problem.

I went to the shops to get some road food, in my case I like to bring water and oatmeal bars which keep me going through the night. One change was that the contest only ran for 24 hours, leaving less time for sleep.

I found my portable antenna tuner, plugged everything in, configured the radio for remote tuning, and tested it all on the bench in my shack.

In further preparation I packed my food, got a headlamp out, spare batteries, a pen and a spare, a ring binder for logging and my wristwatch to keep track of logging times.

The day before the contest I parked the car in the sun, extracted all the cables from behind the backseat, installed the radio, the battery, the head, the suction mount, the microphone, the speaker, the antenna tuner and antenna mount, and got everything where I wanted it.

In between rain showers I located the ropes I use to keep the antenna from breaking off the car when I'm driving, set it all up to length after hunting through the garage to find my multi-tap antenna to suit. Strapped that all together to the handhold in the cabin with a Velcro strap and called it a day.

The next morning I drove to my first activation location, installed the antenna on the 40m band, turned on the radio, tuned it, and called CQ Contest. Made my first contact about six minutes after I started. I was excited. Drove to the next location, made the next contact six minutes later. On a roll I drove to my third spot, where things came unstuck.

I spent the next two hours getting nothing. I changed both location and band, setting the antenna to 15m and after initially tuning once I couldn't get it to tune again. I spent an hour trying. Given that I wasn't far from home, I went back for a break and to pick up one piece of equipment that I should have packed when I started, my antenna analyser.

I tested the antenna and for reasons I still don't understand, it was only resonant on 19 MHz, not much good if you're trying to tune somewhere on 21 MHz.

I moved back to my first spot and changed to the 10m band. Three hours to the minute after my second contact, I made another one, this one outside the state.

By this time it had been raining steadily for four hours, despite a forecast of little or no rain. The car was stuffy, no way to open the window and stay dry, no contacts, no fun. I asked myself why I was doing this and decided that I'd learnt a valuable lesson and packed up and went home.

I did go out later in the afternoon to provide some moral support to a friend who had made double the three contacts I'd made, but by dusk we had both had enough.

My lesson for this week? Test the antenna before you go out and bring your analyser. I must add that I've been contesting for years and I've always packed the analyser but never ever needed it. This time I didn't and Murphy let me know that anything that can happen, will.

It might sound like a dejected wet cat story, but I learnt a valuable lesson and now I've got another challenge, to discover just why my trusty antenna stopped working. If I do find out I'll let you know.

What unexpected lessons have you learnt of late?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB