80m vertical buddistick

80 meters is very difficult band to take on the road as a portable dipole (inverted V) due the long wires (40mt), the horizontal space required to erect a dipole and the height at which the dipole needs to be supported. 

However, my vehicle HF antenna (Bushcomm Highlander 8 multi tap) covers the 8...

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First SOTA with Yaesu FT-857D

On this activation I logged contacts on 10, 20 and 40 meters. As I had the necessary battery power (4.2Ah LifePo) and 100W  TX power I spent a bit of time working DX on 20mt in the afternoon - unfortunately none of them were SOTA chasers.

This was the first time that I completely drained my batter...

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Gap Titan DX

{jcomments off}Update Nov 2014: The Gap Titan has ben sold and replaced by an OCF Dipole in the same location. I found that the elevation of the antenna did not work very well in my situation. Lowering the antenna to <3mt above ground seemed to solve the SWR issues, but unfortunately that location w...

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Icom Tuner connectors


Manual Icom Tuner

Many Icom radios (e.g.7100) have a connector for automatic tuners such as the Icom AH4. The cable supplied by Icom is of a fixed length (10m) and is not shielded. Icom recommends to use shielded cable for any length greater than 10m.

The cable is nothing special and doesn't...

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Long wire and AH4 tuner

To get started on HF I installed a long wire antenna and an Icom AH4 tuner.

The wire runs in NE-SW and is around 22meter long.

The AH4 is is well earthed and uses a shielded multicore cable to connect to the radio in the shack.

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