Apologies, I meant to respond but must have got distracted. You are absolutely right, during the first activation I noticed the compressor was not turned on. I corrected this but I wasn’t sure the setting were correct.
I went through the setting up procedure later and saved the settings as a preset, which you can do on the IC-705.
This is what I used on the second activation but with probably less success - but I think that was down to the noisy conditions.
I’m not an expert on setting the compressor. I suspect the best solution, after following the instructions in the manual, would be to use it in the field and ask a receiving station (arranged in advance) if the signal was better or worse as adjustments were made.
Hi John,
OK it’s a 705 that you have, then I guess it’s like the 7300 and has several settings that affect the audio - one good one is TBW (Transmit Bandwidth) reducing this can give better readability at low signal strengths and combining that with turning the speech compressor on and setting it up correctly will provide a little extra “punch”. It will affect the known good audio quality of the ICOM however, so only turn the compressor on when you know your signal is weak with your contact. I leave my TBW set narowwer than the default setting all of the time and use an external RF-Clipper RF based speech compressor to do the speech compression rather than the internal (audio based) one inside the IC-7300. The discussion here was how to do better with what you had with you or that could be easily added to the portable kit, so using the built-in speech compression and TBW is something that is already available and will help.
On a summit I prefer KISS principles. I would have deployed the smaller dipole as an upper and outer, basically running the arm of the dipole connected to the coax centre up the pole which will put the feed point at about one metre above ground. Then run the other out in the direction that you want to fire your RF. You can choose to hold the “outer” leg horizontal if you have a suitable walking pole, bit of tree branch or whatever. As has been said, this simple vertical can out perform an inverted vee dipole for DX.
Basically the dipole is configured as a 1/4 wave vertical with a single horizontal counterpoise, hence the “upper and outer” name. I prefer to use more than one counterpoise and slope them down towards the ground. I have run the counterpoise on the ground and run the vertical element less than vertical, for example when I’ve been on an awkward pointy summit wanting to run 30m, the 1/4 wave vertical section being longer than my pole.