For Field Day this year, Tony KZ5ADV, Logan KF0ADY and myself N0BCB headed up to the Routt National Forest outside Gould, CO to operate in a quiet HF environment. What a great location! We had our share of mosquitos and rain, but the weather was really great during the contest, which runs from noon Saturday to noon Sunday MDT.

We ran one of the 100W stations (Yaesu FT450) with a 100A/h Battleborn LiFePO4 batteries connected to 250W of solar (roof of Gladiator). The other station (Yaesu FTDX10) from a 100A/h Renogy LiFePO4 battery and 400W of solar. The FT450 station utilized a G5RV Jr and a 40m double bazooka. The FTDX10 station used a Chameleon CHA MPAS system.

It was great to get up for a snowshoe to Zimmerman Lake! This is an easy, year-round trail of the Poudre Canyon Highway (Colorado 14). With all the recent snow, the trail was only packed up to the lake. I had fun blazing trail for about 1/2 a mile! Since it was a weekday and the roads were still a bit slick, there weren’t too many others up there. I really enjoyed the quiet of the mountains, and the clear, blue skies.

Today I spent some time playing around with my new mini 9-section shockcord whip.  I started out on 10m and used the standard mini-buddipole parts.  Versatee –> 2×11″ arms each side –> coil –> standard whip.  I set this up as a horizontal dipole, with the coils tapped in 1.5 turns on each side.  Whips fully extended.  I fed the Versatee with the TRSB at 1:1, with 25′ of RG-8X coax.  The antenna performed really well with low SWR, and I was easily able to work a Brazil station.

Next up was 12 meters with the shockcord as a vertical.  I put the 9-section whip on the versatee, with the stinger retracted and no accessory arms, no co

Yesterday I did some craigslist shopping to get the pieces and parts needed to add racks to my truck topper. I was going to weld up custom racks but liked the flexibilty of these commercial track systems. The towers and crossbars I found are Thule, but the tracks I found are Yakima. Everything I found online suggested the tracks are identical, but that is not true!  The plates used in the Thule system are too thick to nest correctly in the Yakima tracks. Using them like that could lead to serious failure. So, I machined the plates down a little to fit correctly. 

This was my first year as a vendor at the Northern Colorado Amateur Radio Hamfest.  I did pretty well with 1 table and a bunch of junk!  I managed to sell almost everything I brought, and made enough money to fund a kegging system for my homebrew beer endeavors.

So far behind on this blog, but it is still active and I hope to update it more in the near future.  I have many projects that I would like to document here.

Bryan N0BCB