DON'T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT THEM
ONE-BOX PORTABLE HAM STATIONS
Experience taught me that a missing cable or special connector could spoil an outing in very short order.
A solution to the problem appeared in the April, 1995 issue of QST magazine under the title, "Build the Camper's Portable Hamshack." The article describes how to build a custom cabinet made to house a complete station in a single, portable box.
Up front are my faithful Heathkit HW-8 transceiver, an MFJ transmatch and a homebrew keyer. Inside are batteries, headphones, paddles, cables, connectors, spare fuses, a portable antenna, writing materials, a 24- hour clock and so on.
The Camper's Portable Hamshack, shown in the accompanying photograph, goes with me almost everywhere. It's a common sight at local hamfests and often gives new hams their first glimpse of portable operation and QRP in general.
My packing list for weekend camping trips always includes the familiar, almond colored box. I even use it in my back yard from time to time.
Because it is completely self contained, I no longer have to worry about leaving some critical part behind when I'm headed for the field. I simply grab the box and go.
As versatile as The Camper's Portable Hamshack is, it is not without problems. Because of its size it can be somewhat awkward to handle. The internal 7 Ah gel-cell battery adds enough weight to make the whole station difficult to carry much further than from the car to the picnic table.
Because of the shortcomings in the original version, I opted to build a smaller, lighter weight portable hamshack, shown in the accompanying photograph.
This time the design was centered around an MFJ 9040 transceiver and its matching ë971 portable transmatch.
My ë9040 has the optional built-in Curtis keyer and accessory audio filter. The larger battery was replaced by a surplus 3 Ah gel-cell. To complete the size and weight reduction program, a set of Whiterook paddles was substituted for the heavier Nye Viking paddles.
While this is still far from being a backpacking station, it is much easier to handle than the first version. The singular disadvantage of this particular setup is that it only operates on 40 meters whereas the HW-8 is a four band rig.
For backpacking and ultra portable use I built a tiny, self-contained station packed inside a zippered book bag, shown in the accompanying photograph.
The bag itself measures 9-inches wide, 6-inches deep and 2-inches thick. The transceiver is a scratch-built NE40-40 shoehorned into a homebrew plastic enclosure measuring 3.25 inches wide by 4.25-inches long by 2-inches high. Included in the transceiver case is a TiCK-1 keyer chip from Embedded Research.
The rig itself weighs just under seven ounces and is powered by eight, alkaline AA batteries.
The station is rounded out by a set of Whiterook paddles and a homebrew 40 meter dipole. I first used this setup during The ARS Flight of the Bumblebees contest in 1997.
It has since seen action in a couple Spartan Sprints as well as numerous camping trips.
One-box ham stations are easy to build and provide a large measure of peace of mind.
Since I stopped packing my portable stations one piece at a time, I have never been caught in the field with a missing cable or special connector. Can you say the same?
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Bill Jones, KD7S, a contributing technical editor for The ARS Sojourner, is an expert builder, QRP operator and outdoorsman living in Sanger, CA.