kit building – W7MTB: Amateur Radio Notes

Activation Report: W7O/CE-188 – Lava Butte

We haven’t been terribly active on the air of late. Only one activation since August, so we (KK7HJL and I) decided to take a couple hours on Thanksgiving Eve to hike up Lava Butte to activate. While the park is “closed” they do leave the gate to the parking lot open to allow folks to walk up the road to the top for some epic view of the Central Oregon mountains.

November has been pretty cold, and we had a couple of good snowstorms early in the month, leaving the road a mix of compacted snow and ice in areas that don’t see much sun. On this particular day, the outside air temp was hovering around 50 degrees so the top layer of the white snow was fairly easy to walk on, and any areas of the road exposed to the sun were dry or nearly so. The walk from the parking lot took about 60 minutes and we had the place to ourselves when we reached the top, though we didn’t expect to see many people, there was only 1 car in the lot when we arrived.

Since I had already activated Lava Butte back in April, I was mostly along for morale support for Randi and to test my rusty CW skills. I recently received the Penntek 35 radio I built back from the kit manufacturer after experiencing an audio chip failure. John WA3RNC, very graciously asked me to send the radio to him to troubleshot and fix it at no cost. I had taken it out a couple of other times but didn’t make any contacts so I was anxious to see if I could do better from a summit.

I had intended to try 40,20 and 17 meters so I started on by setting up my K6ARK End Fed Half Wave on 40. I called QRL and heard a very faint, slightly off-frequency response, but was unable to make it out on the summit. Later, K7ATN emailed to let me know that he had heard my QRL and responded with ‘SOTA?’. I had to listen to the recording several times, but I was able to make that out eventually. Regardless, I began calling CQ and worked 7 or 8 stations. I struggled with WB6POT but he patiently kept with me, turns out B and 6 are difficult for me to distinguish.

Meanwhile, Randi – KK7HJL, began calling CQ on 2M. She did the entire activation on her own, didn’t ask for any prompts and made 6 contacts around Central Oregon. She said she was in search of that RF High she learned about after our recent activation on Catalina Island in late October.

Since my copy skills weren’t great I decided to shut it down and tear down instead of trying 20 or 17M. Again, this was about getting her out more than my needing to collect contacts. Also, the tourists had started to arrive and we didn’t want to be annoying anyone. We managed to tear down and bug out after only a 30 minute activation, which left us plenty of time to grab a beer at the Boneyard Pub back in Bend on our way back to the QTH. We lucked out and found an unoccupied couch to sit and enjoy our delicious malt beverages while watching a replay of the USA vs Canada women’s hockey match from the previous weekend.

Lava Butte National Volcanic Monument is a pretty easy SOTA/POTA site. During the “season” there is a charge to park in the lot but once they close the monument for the winter, it’s free parking. Access is easy from US 97 Southbound about 4 miles south of Bend. The Northbound 97 exit is closed in the winter. The hike up is about 1.5 miles of pavement and there are plenty of places to setup to activate once on top. Eventually there will be a paved path from the south end of Bend up to Lava Butte, making it a very easy bicycle ride or walk from town but until then you either have to drive or take the Deschutes River Trail like Tim – N7KOM and I did back in April. This would be a great first SOTA activation destination as the views are top notch and one can easily get 2M contacts from Bend and LaPine.

Penntek TR-35 4 Band CW Transceiver – First Transceiver Build

WA3RNC Penntek TR-35 4 Band, 5 Watt Transceiver

One of the things that drew me to amateur radio is the kit building aspect. Only weeks into the hobby, and before I had my hands on an HF rig I was ordering parts for an End fed random wire build I found on the AARL site. The first build went well but I haven’t been very impressed with the performance from the QTH. Since it’s a random wire antenna, it requires a tuner in the field, which I don’t have with me normally so it hasn’t seen much use.

I’ve built a couple of other antennas since with the K6ARK EFHW being my favorite but I wanted to up the challenge. I love the Icom IC-705 but its a bit heavy for SOTA Ops so I decided I wanted to build something smaller. I’ve been learning CW so I shopped for a really small, simple CW only kit. I looked at several packages and settled on the QCX Mini from QRPLabs. I ordered the package with the aluminum case and ACG module at a total of $84 before shipping, seemed like a good deal except for the 2 month wait.

Not long after I ordered the first radio I saw a video from Thomas, K4SWL, on the Penntek TR-35. I had looked at the radio previously but thought it a lot of money for a CW only radio that didn’t have any memory. One thing I love about my IC-705 is that is has 10 recorded memories for both voice and CW, which is almost a requirement for calling CQ lest one get a hand cramp in the field. Everything else about the radio looked fantastic, 4-Band, 5 Watt transceiver in a nice plastic case to reduce weight. There are a lot of features packed into this little radio and you can even have it assembled by pro’s at the factory if building isn’t your thing. WA3RNC continually adds to the software and the latest update includes two memory channels that Thomas demonstrated during and activation and I was sold. I ordered a kit before finishing the video and it arrived in less that a week.

The kits is really, really well put together. The instructions are very clear and verbose. The parts are packed in sealed strips, with each step’s parts in a separate little “bubble”, so as long as you only open the current steps parts and complete that step prior to opening the next, you will never loose parts. I found this very, very helpful as this was the most complex kit I have assembled to date.

The instructions are broken into four discrete parts:

READ ME FIRST
TR-35 Upper Board Assembly Instructions
TR-35 Lower Board Assembly Instructions
TR-35 Preliminary Checks, Tests and Final Assembly

Also included are a schematic and Operating Guide.

This being a rather expensive kit, $279 USD, I didn’t want to screw anything up soI read through the entire assembly instructions and highlighted things that seemed important or would be easily missed. This is something I learned after a couple failed builds due to missing a detail because I misread or was in a hurry… doh!

The entire build took me ~ 5 hours, though that was spread out across a couple of weeks as I had a trip and lots of work to do during that time. Usually when I build a kit I want to sit down and complete it start to finish so I don’t loose anything but as I mentioned previously, the way this is packaged made it easy to complete a step when I had 10-15 minutes of free time over the course of the build. Since the toroids are pre-wound, it is mostly a soldering build. Having a good quality, heat controlled iron, good solder (Kester 60/40 lead) and flux (not a requirement) and side clippers are a must. The only other tool I used was my multimeter during initial testing.

Once completed, I let it set for a few days so as not to rush the testing. I re-read the Preliminary Checks guide and made a checklist of each of the tests so I didn’t miss anything. Testing took me an hour or so, other than having to wait for new fuses for my Multimeter’s ampere testing circuit so I could do the Final RF amplifier bias adjustment. Everything checked out, so I decided to power it on and make the final adjustments before testing it on the air. With those final steps completed and the final assembly of the case, knobs, buttons, switch covers done, I hooked it up to the 20 M dipole I have on the roof and listened. I was astonished that it worked and I managed to not screw anything up.

I’ve now had it out in the field a couple of times and used it in the backyard several times and am very impressed. My only gripe right now is that the output volume of the keyer and the overall output are linked, so when listening to faint signals I have to remember to turn the volume down before I key lest I blow out my eardrums. This may be something I can adjust but I haven’t investigated yet. I have made a couple of contacts on 20M and intend to do several SOTA activations in my neighborhood in the near future as well as build the QCX Mini and do a comparison.

K6ARK End Fed Half Wave (EFHW) build and test

I watched a video on the Ham Radio Crash Course about this very tiny and relatively easy-to-build antenna a few months ago and bought one right away from Amazon. It only took about 30 minutes start to finish, the hardest part being attaching the surface mount capacitor as the video describes. I have since use it pretty much exclusively when activating the in the field. I even had a SOTA SSB QSO with Adam, K6ARK, himself during a SOTA activation at Smith Rock State Park!

I am using 18 gauge wire cut for 20M. I used my NanoVNA to tune and marked 10-20M on the wire with various colors of shrink wrap to differentiate the bands. I have a second length of wire that I added banana clips to connect so I can get up to 40M if I want to. If I want to use a new band I unroll from the Buddipole wire holder to the marking and check the SWR function on the IC-705 in the field and so far have had pretty good success. I’ve done several POTA and SOTA activations using SSB with the antenna. I love how simple and portable this setup is.

This is a great DIY antenna project, it simple to build and easy to use and I’d suggest it for anyone interested in field QRP activating.

K6ARK End Fed Half Wave QRP antenna with wire on Buddipole winder