Special to The ARS Sojourner
August 2006
A recent business trip to the Canso Causeway, located between Cape Breton Island and mainland Nova Scotia, gave me an opportunity to try my end-fed four band portable antenna.
To see more about Canso Causeway, go to: http://www.cansocauseway.ca/main.html
If possible, I always stay in a place where I can get on the air. Here is the cottage I stayed in. It was ideal – a nice tree out front, and no QRN.
Here is the view off the side. On the top of the picture, you can see part of the antenna.
View from the front
Here you can see the antenna going from the back of the chair to the top of the door.
The speaker in this picture is Creative's “Travel Sound.” It is intended for CD players or MP3 players, but it works really well on the KX1. It has a built in amplifier and runs on 4 AA batteries. The model number is MF5000.
When not using the Travel Sound speaker, I use the Sony ear buds – model MDR-EX51LP. These have great sound on the KX1 and are the only ones I can keep in my ears for an extended period of time without hurting.
The antenna I used with the KX1 has always been an end fed 42-foot wire with a 16-foot counterpoise. Now with the 80-meter band added, I tried the antenna suggested by Bruce Prior, N7RR, on QRP-L, which is 67' - 9" with a counterpoise of 33-feet. I rounded this off by making it 68-feet – maybe I should have trimmed it. I also used my electrician's method of measuring, by stretching out my arms, rather than using a measuring tape. It gets me within an inch!
It worked great on 80, 30 and 20 for me, but the SWR was up (1.9) on 40M. After fiddling with the counterpoise, I decided to try Ron Eau Claire’s, AC7AC, suggestion of adding a coil to the antenna. Here you can see my crude “in the field” built coil. It worked great. It dropped the SWR flat (with the KX1 tuner) on 40, but drove up the other three bands. It's not much trouble to clip and unclip this coil, so I was quite happy with this arrangement. A more permanent coil is in the plan for the future.
The coil was made from my old 16-foot counterpoise. It turned out to be 22 turns around my glasses case (approximately 1-1/4” x 2-1/2”).
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Paul Pike, VE1DY, is a QRPer living in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia, Canada.