CW power

Activation Reports
1

Yesterday when I was driving towards Lauhanvuori OH/JS-032 I remembered suddenly that I had forgot external battery at home. What to do I thought and the worst case rose already to my mind – useless trip god dammit. But then I remembered that internal batteries of my FT-817 are full loaded and I have 1.4 Ah power for running. But how long it lasts with 5W? Ooh, I do not need to use the whole power, perhaps less is needed.

I have never before used less than 5W in the summit but now I decided to test with 1W which could make my summit possible. Station up and on the air. I was not sure if I could get any qsos. But, but when I added a new spot and sent the first cqs on 14 MHz – what happened – a huge pile up! Quite soon I had 14 qsos and reports were “normal” compared to 5W. Then I changed to 10 MHz, 21 MHz and at least 18 MHz. After 1 hour 37 minutes I had 32 qsos in four bands. Two summit to summit qsos and longest contacts were to 9H and CT.

Lauhanvuori is National Park were people are walking on free time. My station was in one cross and many people passed me looking what I was doing. Team of ladies passed me too and they looked me very deeply but did not say anything. When they returned after on hour they stopped to me and asked if they can ask what I am doing? Well, ladies got a 10 minutes presentation in live what is ham sprit and especially summit on the air. :grinning:

Working with 1W was very encouraging and I suppose that in future I will make tests with lower powers. This experience was a good example of CW power!

73, Saku OH2NOS

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2

Yes Saku CW Rules OK :wink:

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Hi Saku

A while back we had a challenge here running generally 100mW or less (mostly 20-30-40m). None of us had any trouble making lots of contacts - CW of course.

It’s surprising just how low you can go and still make contacts when people are actively looking for you. Calling CQ running 100mW from home is much less successful.

73 Richard G3CWI

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In case you forget the external battery again, you might want to consider installing a 2500 maH LIPO battery inside the 817 (several how-to articles on the web) - the Yaesu rechargable battery isn’t very good compared to the more modern LIPO technology.

I have found it has capacity enough for 2 or even 3 summits at 5W (RF speech compressed - so heavy load) SSB output.

Ed.

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5

I did a similar thing, except I lugged the 7ah slab up Brown Clee Hill, and left the connecting cable at home, on the floor, next to the charger.

Still managed 2 x contacts across the pond to NC with around 2.5w, one of whom called me back to check it was actually 2.5w, using the internal batteries. (and some ribbon cable…)

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