This week I saw an alert from Jarek, @SP9MA planned for December 27th, to celebrate his 62nd birthday activating SP/BZ-062, nice idea!
I agree to do a joint activation with Jorge, EA2LU, in EA2/NV-032. There we went and activated, I was mainly SSB while Jorge did CW.
I was waiting to see a spot from Jarek popping up, but the morning developed without seeing him.
When we were about to end our activation I just tuned in 20 CW and found a station calling lonely in 14.061. It was Jarek calling CQ without any spot yet!
We did greet him and worked S2S and I raised a spot for him. Well, mission accomplished.
Then we stopped the activation and we raised a toast drinking a glass of Soplica, a cherry liquour that Jarek gave us as a gift in Friedrichshafen ham fair, back in June this year!
Na zdrowie Jarek, happy birthday!
Carbon pole antenna
Jorge suggested some time ago that perhaps a carbon fiber pole could be used as an antenna radiator. I remembered an old thread from Takeshi @JG1GPY explaining about this idea:
To my surprise, Jorge prepared his own version and brought it yesterday for a first time trial.
Jorge did some measurements at home and found the external layer of the rods are better for electrical conductivity. Although the connection between rods seems to be bad as there is no conductivity between parts, there should be any sort of coupling between the rods so that in the end the whole extended pole acts as a radiator. He wasn’t very sure this would work but decided to give it a go.
He did a neat job adding a very good conductive contact point in the base rod of a 5m long Decathlon Lakeside-5 pole, by removing with care the painting in the outer layer to bring the base material accessible.
Then he added some electrical grease, a light metal plate and finally a support to hold a BNC connector and some banana jack binding post for radials. He just added 4 short radials (about 4m long) and tested if the KX2 built in tuner could tune this combo in the summit.
SWR was very good at 18 & 21 MHz, and just acceptable (2,5:1) for 14 MHz. The rest of the bands were not worky, although maybe a future change in the radials could improve it.
He started the activation running on 21 MHz first. He kept an eye on RBN spots and to his surprise he got an automatic spot after his third call, good news! The highlight was a call from Andrei @ZL1TM. Jorge was astonished he could hear and work him so well with such an antenna!
Later Jorge ran on 18 and 14 MHz. See the spots picked by RBN network during the activation:
Jorge, is there any other interesting thing about such antenna?
Thanks everybody for the QSO and Happy new year!
73 Ignacio
