This Year's Challenge. Small and Mini Projects. And Antennas.

This year, as opposed to last year, I have the intention to do some more building and construction activities. Last year was the year of 365 QSOs with 5W, later 365 with just 5W and solar power.

This year is more about getting some physical things done. This does not mean that I will not do much operation. Especially as propagation is among my great interests.

My antennas need an overhaul, and an update. At the moment I have:

For HF: R6000 for 10,12,15,17 and 20m (6m usable for some monitoring). Then a 5 band dipole, 10,15,20,40,80m, passable on 4 and 6m. Also a 30m long wire antenna with some limited counterpoise. This is passable for all HF bands and barely usable for 6 and 4m, and should be usable if I want to listen on 8m (40MHz). a 1/2 wave antenna for 10-11m is OK.

For VHF/UHF I have the V-2000 vertical from diamond running 50, 144 and 432MHz. A cable is running into the shack to a triplexer, running up to 3 different radios. A short (1m long) dual or triband antenna is used for monitoring 2m and 70cm, and a clover leaf ("Big Wheel")  for 2m. My 4m vertical is not standing upright at the moment, so it is not very useful.

This year I want to get up and running on a few more bands/modes. That requires new antennas and some kind of rotating functionality.

For 2m I want to do some more SSB/CW etc. (DX) activity. The 4 element yagi mentioned in an earlier post should do that.

For 70cm I also want to add DX activity. The 11 (really 8) element yagi is intended for that.

23cm: I have had some activity on that band a few decades ago, and because there is an activity group active now on this band I want to get some activity going again, this time with better equipment than I had back then. The 16 element yagi is intended for that.

I am (a bit) active on the QO100 geostationary satellite, transmitting on 13cm and receiving on 3cm.

I want to become active  with terrestrial on those bands, even if it will be with small antennas form home. Those are more directional than the VHF/UHF antennas, and need to be rotated as well.

I suspect that some portable operation from hilltops will be good for the microwave bands (above 1GHz), as I have obstructions in several directions, so range is a bit limited. This means that both a home station and some portable equipment is needed. I am building up my stock of equipment and antennas, and no, I do not expect to finish all of it this year.

In any case I want to be able to extend the number of bands where I have made at least one QSO. In this case we are talking about 2400MHz and 10GHz, and maybe later on the two bands in the other end of the spectrum, 630m and 2200m.

Then there are the small projects and mini projects, I have the goal of making at least one or two of those every month, as they are limited in scope.

One (two) of the somewhat larger projects are about assembling two QCX+ kits I have, one for 20m and one for 60m. Those are 5W CW transceivers, and should provide much fun in the future.