I had a little bit of fun on 80 metres tonight using the low power JT65 mode. Having chased some of the special event IARU and YOTA call signs during the day, I found the bands a bit dead this evening and decided to see if anyone was on JT65. To my surprise, 3.576 was quite busy with signals. So I gave it a go.
The above video was made while making a QSO into England during a good run of contacts. I had eight QSOs tonight - which might not sound like much - but every QSO on JT65 takes at least four minutes, so it's not bad. I had contacts into England, The Netherlands, Germany and Austria. All QSOs were made with 14 watts from my transceiver, transmitted into my home brew 80 metre inverted v dipole.
All of the stations that heard my signal on JT65, reported on pskreporter.info.
My small signal was heard all over Europe and even in the United States, as you can see from the above map. One of the great joys of using JT65 is because it's a slow-paced, relaxing mode, you can do something else while making contacts. In this case, I was making a YouTube video! The "live" recording caught me unawares towards the end!
A portion of my log today, showing a lot of IARU and YOTA SES contacts.
The car at Red Mountain with the antenna on the roof.
This evening after work I finally got a chance to test my new portable set-up for real. Previously, I had only tested it in the main shack connected to my home antennas. But today I wanted to give it a REAL test. So I took the portable station in my car to a hill about two miles from where I live called Red Mountain, just overlooking Donore village in County Meath. I wanted to run five watts only on either digi modes or CW, running off a separate battery, not the car battery. I didn't know what to expect . . . or even if it would work properly, although having tested it at home I felt it would.
It took me a few minutes to get everything out of the box and connected up. Eventually I would like to make a proper "go box", but for now I have to connect all the leads and that's OK. It only took a few minutes. I was using the Watson Multi-Ranger antenna on the roof of the car. I decided to use PSK31 so I didn't bother connecting a mic to the radio, or indeed the K1EL keyer. All I had to do was connect the radio to the battery, the antenna to the ATU, and the Signalink to both the computer and the radio. Oh, and I used the new Icom CI-V interface so that HRD could read the frequency and mode from the rig.
Everything fit on the passenger seat. It was a little uncomfortable because
I had to turn sideways to operate, but it all worked very well.
With all that done, I tuned up and then started CQing on 14.070.85 using just five watts. I was chatting to a couple of the local guys on two metres also. After five minutes of Cqing there was nothing, so I was thinking I might change to CW, but all of a sudden a F5 station was calling me! So I successfully made a QSO with him. I finished, thinking how delighted I was to have successfully made a contact with five watts when a German station called me. I worked him too. Then an Italian called me and I logged him. In total, I worked five stations in half an hour. The last one was the best DX contact - into Ukraine.
Working DL9KW Karl-Heinz on PSK31 with 5 watts.
It was great fun - and very rewarding. The location helped. The hill falls away steeply towards the east so there would be good take-off into Europe. I packed everything away into the EI2KC portable case with a smile on my face.
I'm hoping to do more portable work soon - perhaps with a couple of the local hams in tow. We could maybe bring a flask of tea and some sandwiches and biscuits and make a nice social event out of it too...
Just a couple of things I need to do for next time. I need to get better clamps or connectors to keep the power lead connected to the battery. I also need to get a shorter RJ45 cable to connect the Signalink to the rig - it's too long currently.
I am dipping in and out of the ARRL 10m contest this weekend. Low power mixed. Running 100 watts into my Antron 99. Did some CW after this video. Conditions have faded a wee bit.
Right now, I'm dabbling in a bit of low-power JT65. I was putting out a CQ using JT65-HF (version 1.0.9.3) on 20 metres and, as you can see from PSKreporter.info above, my puny signal was heard in Japan!! Right now, I'm in QSO with W2ZEN (Locator FN30) and he gave me a SNR report of -21. I don't do JT65 very often. In fact, I've only used it a few times, but it is absolutely fascinating. Hopefully I'll get some nice DX tonight. I can't imagine I will make too many contacts though - it takes a full six minutes to complete a QSO properly with this mode!!!
