Weatherized (sort of) battery gets a new battery charger

Battery charger kit from A&A Engineering after the solder has cooled.

I weatherized (sort of) a 7.2 amp-hour battery two weeks ago for use with my QRP radio in the field. But there was a minor problem. The battery came out of a small uninterruptible power supply used for computers. Once I pulled the battery out of the UPS case, I had no convenient way to recharge it.

Enter A&A Engineering‘s 1-amp smart charger. I first got wind of this on a QRP list-server to which I subscribe. And, yes, at $65 for the kit, it probably is possible to find cheaper chargers. But I’m a sucker for kit-building. And with the addition of a couple of binding posts and a diode later, this unit also can take juice from a solar panel and route it to the battery for recharging.

The name is Spotts, Pete Spotts. Bumble bee 007

Oh man! I forgot my fershlugginer keyer paddles!

Aw right! Flight of the Bumble Bees numbers for one of 2011′s most popular QRP contests are finally available!

Many thanks to Larry “When You Care Enough to Send the Very Least” Makoski, W2LJ, who is handing out the numbers this year and running the event. Who can turn down the ever famous 007? Not me, for sure. OK, he really gave me 0007, but I won’t tell Sean Connery if you won’t. The extra 0? That means its a license to chill.

Larry describes, over at his blog, how he stepped into it this year — “it,” being the role of Contest Manager.

Oh yes, the Flight of the Bumble Bees. It’s a one-day operating event that falls on the last Sunday in July — the 31st this year. It runs from 1700-2100 UTC. Or, in my neck of the woods, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Rumor has it that it’s the premier QRP event of the year for many hams. I don’t know about that. All I know is, it’s great fun.

As the name perhaps implies, the idea is to flee the hive and set up operations in the field. But to make things interesting, those receiving BB numbers agree to walk, bicycle, or boat their way to their operating locations. The object for participants, including the bees, is to contact as many other participants as possible in the alloted time, while snagging as many BB numbers as possible.

It will be a good workout for my evolving QRP field kit. But it also sounds like a scoring nightmare when it’s over. But, hey, that’s why Larry is getting the big bucks! 

The next sound you will hear is the rustle of a map unfolding as I hunt for a site! Google Earth is cool, but it doesn’t quite carry the same cartographic charm as an old-fashioned topo map.

One ham’s hip-huggin’ portable QRP station

One for the road, please, or, how I cram for my QRP field exams.

Ham radio operators who like to take their QRP gear into the field — or on trips where fitted sheets and fluffy pillows replace sleeping bags and Thermarest pads — have come up with a myriad ways to corral their gear into easily toted packages.

Herein is yet one more approach, which grew out of preparations for last summer’s Lobstercon QRP weekend in Maine. I had just finished building a basic Electraft KX1 and was trying to figure out a way to pull a station together when I came across the fanny pack, er, no, now they are called “lumbar packs,” above.

It came out of L.L. Bean’s catalog, but one never knows how big something really is until one sees it in person. So, on my way up to Lobstercon, I stopped at the Beanster’s to see the pack up close and personal. Obviously, I was sold.

So what all do I stuff into the pack, a kind of five-ring circus?

The radio — either my FT-817ND or my KX1 — fit into the main pocket in the back of the pack, along with the Emtech ZM-2 antenna tuner (two knobs, white front panel), and the blue plastic battery box (5.2 amp-hours worth of AA lithium batteries). The FT-817′s power cord (to the right of the tuner) and the ear buds (between the carabiners and the antenna bundles), fit into small pockets in the main compartment.

The mic, 50-pound test fishing line and the coax that connects the tuner to the radio, slip into the larger front pocket. The two carabiners, which serve as end weights for wire antennas, slip into the half-pocket on the front of the pack.

I was running out of room to carry my keyer paddle and straight key, so I picked up an extra pouch, a hard-side, zippered case that slips onto the lumbar pack’s belt. It’s just the right size for the two keys, as you can see here:

An American Morse Equipment Porta Paddle 2 shares a home with a French Jardillier mini key. And, yes, I wrap up the straigh key's cord before I zip the case!

Finally, in each of the lumbar pack’s two side pouches I carry my two Norcal doublets — a 44-foot version and an 88-foot version. The 88-footer is in the lower-left corner of the “class photo” above. It fits neatly into the pocket, thusly:

One antenna, to go...

Truth to tell, I also bring a day pack along, which carries other gear, munchies, pull-overs, jackets, and such, as well as a 7.2 amp-hour battery. I use the smaller battery pack if I run longer than the 7.2 amp-hour battery allows. And I still have to lug my 31-foot Jackite pole, but that’s why they invented cars!

One item that will soon join this menagerie is a Norcal keyer in an Altoids tin. A couple more connections to solder, and it’s done!

Norcal doublet antenna: Even the long version rocks

QRPxpedition station to test the 88-foot version of the Norcal doublet antenna. Gotta have that straight key for contacts with my SKCC cohorts!

Day is done. The QRPxpedition to my backyard deck to test an 88-foot version of the Norcal doublet is in the books. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the antenna is a keeper.

I started setting up around 1600 UTC, using my embarrassingly bright orange Jackite pole as a center support for the light-weight doublet. I hooked my FT-817ND up to my newly tricked-out battery, and with a ZM-2 antenna tuner to run  interference, I fed some RF into the antenna.

It tuned up nicely on 80-10. I may give 160 a try tomorrow. And the log is now filled with some additional DX contacts, as well as a handful domestic QSOs. Among the contacts:

RU3EG in Russia

OL100VP, a Czech special-event station celebrating 100 years of a local soccer club

IR5ONU, a UNICEF special-event station in Italy

9A04JB in Croatia

F6HKA, a Straight Key Century Club buddy in France

EI0CZ in Ireland (one of two Irish stations)

EA6UN, in the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean

ZB2FK on Gibralter

Several of these involved elbowing my way through pile-ups. Wait, I’m a QRPer. So I must have merely been tugging on pants legs! Hey, mister, woodja talk to me, too?

Closer to home, I had nice semi rag chew with WU0L in South Dakota, another QRPer also running 5 watts. Semi because the needs of my canine companion, Luke, became too urgent for him to endure a full-scale rag chew.

But ya gotta love the Irish. Heck, I live near Boston, where Celtic (if not the woebegone Celtics) is cool.  I’m convinced that EI5DR, Ed, in county Mayo, and EI0CZ, Brendan, in county Clare, gave me the only honest signal reports among my day’s DX contacts. Both gave me 589s. Everyone else overseas gave me either the perfunctory 599, or if I was really weak in their ears, the perfunctory 559.

So here’s to you, Ed and Brendan. You and Mark, WU0L, gave me the best fix on how my new antenna was doing!

Hams, doublets, and we’re not talking Shakespeare

The basic ingredients for a Norcal doublet antenna -- ribbon wire, some fishing swivels, and a few narrow cable ties. Come to think of it, we've got the ingredients for three doublets, since the ribbon wire is 12 conductors across!

It’s Friday. I’m on vacation. A sunny mild day is in the forecast. Just right for a QRPxpedition to the back deck to try out an 88-foot doublet antenna I assembled last night.

But with a house lot shaped like a wedge of pie, I wont’ be setting this up as a garden variety, fully-extended wire antenna. The lot doesn’t have the space. So I’m going to try it out as a horizontal vee, or what I think of as an archer’s antenna. But more on that later.

The doublet is the Norcal doublet, a light-weight variation on an antenna that amateur-radio operators have used for decades.

It’s easy to pull together, it’s cheap (something we hams really love), and it’s effective. You can find the original instructions for pulling the antenna together here. But to save you an extra mouse click, I’ll step through the, well, steps I took to assemble an 88-foot-long version of the 44-foot original, which I made last year. I’ve added a very small modification that to my mind makes it a tad easier to use repeatedly.

Weatherizing (sort of) a battery for portable QRP ops

A 7.2 amp-hour battery gets a new home for portable operations, courtesy of a 1.6 liter Really Useful Box -- yep, that's its trade name. The handles clip onto the ends of the lid to secure it to the box

With the weather warming up, it’s time to take the radios to the field — and the battery(ies) to power them.

Last summer, I put together a tight little field battery pack for my Elecraft KX1, housed in a small Really Useful Box from Staples. With the addition of an FT-817ND QRP radio to my shack, I needed a battery with a  little more oomph. So, during Lobstercon last summer, I picked up (for a song) a small UPC at the event’s mini swap meet and copped its 7.2 amp-hour battery.

But with a pair of bare terminals, the battery is not the kind of thing you want rattling around loose in a day pack. And if it sits out on a table when the rain comes, well, that can lead to major unpleasantness as well. Which led me back to the Really Useful Box collection at Staples.

The battery fit into a 1.6 liter box snuggly end to end, and with room to spare front to back. I used the box to carry it to several outings last year. But what about using it to run more than one black box — maybe some accessories to go with the QRP radio, such as an outboard keyer or my NEScaf audio filter. And just maybe, a place to connect the A & A Engineering battery charger kit I’m wrapping up this week. Or a solar panel/charger at some point.

And so, a new battery case was born, but not without a learning curve.