Moving On - To Copper Pipes!

So, whilst I waited for my brain to digest all the new antenna information, I looked around for something else to get on air with.

There was a lot of copper pipe lying around - the stuff you use for plumbing houses.  That seemed a very good idea.  The 10m band was running pretty strong at the end of 2008, so being fairly small wavelengths, I decided to cut some copper tubes into a horizontal, fixed dipole.

The copper water pipe 10m dipole.  Very basic, very cheap, but it gets you on air!

Well it took a bit of trimming to resonate, but even just attached temporarily to a plastic bin at a metre above ground, it got an easy contact 5/7 into Greece.  When it was up on a 4 m pole, it was getting me 5/9 reports into the eastern seaboard of the US.  Not bad!  What's more, it was (with nylon washing line guys fixed to chopped-up fence posts with cable ties) very wind resistant, and held-up through all the violent 85mph+ gales of winter.  Even if it hadn't, it would be very easy - and cheap - to repair.

This kept me going for a bit, and it even managed, with the help of an ATU, to get a few European contacts on 40m, although it was obviously hopelessly inefficient for that band.

But the important bit that all those retired, stacked 5-element, $3000 SteppIR owners miss is that new hams just want to speak to someone - and it doesn't really matter where.  It's a miracle, when you're new to amateur radio, that a signal from a clapped-out mobile rig wired-up to a copper pipe antenna crosses the Atlantic and that someone answers a CQ call.  It also gives you the confidence to move ahead with building your own antennas, which is a very good move if you want to save a lot of money.

For the next step I took to improve my station, tune in soon...

Starting Out in Amateur Radio

Are you, like me, pretty new to amateur radio?  I got my licence 15 years ago, forgot a lot of what I used to pass the dreaded exam, and now find myself re-learning a lot to keep in line on air!

My first transceiver - Kenwood's sturdy TS-50, complete with trademark very good audio.

I've read more than a small library on amateur radio since the end of 2009.  Added to that are the endless hours on-line, which seems to produce a lot of opinion but little by way of consensus!  It's a certainty that, if one person loves a G5RV and has used it most of his transmitting life, someone else will trash it as useless.  That kind of thing is really not very helpful!

My e-bay-acquired Kenwood TS-50 arrived in as-new condition; it evidently had not seen much use in its several years of life.  But what did I do with it?  I had no coax, plugs, ATU, or even a power supply.  Worst of all, I had no antenna!

A small battery pack kept me going for a few weeks.  It didn't allow for much more than 50W output, and even then, it had to be permanently on recharge or otherwise recharged after an hour or so of working.  Not ideal!

Once the power was running, I decided I'd run a long wire of a semi-random length out of the shack (read 'kitchen'), up to the chimney and down as a sloper to the end of our admittedly quite large garden.

It works, but I wouldn't recommend it - at all!

Did it work?  Yep!  In no time at all, I was speaking to people Very Far Away (VFA) - some were in the USA and others in the Bahamas!  Amazing for such a simple set-up.

But it came at a price.  Although the wire would tune 40-10m, it was a bit of a wild child.  Very twitchy to tune, needing steady hands in places!  It also had the nasty habit of bringing in RF into the shack - a well-known problem with these types of antennae.  On occasion, so much came in that I'd get a nasty RF burn as it skipped across the microphone.  Not exactly very painful, but not to be recommended for human or transceiver.  Occasionally, on some frequencies, it wouldn't shock me but would lead to poor audio; you can hear the interference in your headphones and it's rather pointless trasnsmitting under those circumstances. 

I stuck with this wire for a month or so whilst I waited for new stuff to arrive in the post.  Despite its problems, which forced no more than 50W output to keep the shack RF under control, I managed one morning to work Australia long path.  Not bad for what is probably one of the worst antennae you can imagine!

So, where did I go next?  Tune-in soon to find out!