DX for Pennies

The WARC bands are really underrated.  This weekend, it's been wild on the other bands, where as is often the case, middle aged men are shouting 'contest' endlessly in the hope of getting themselves a certificate.  Each to their own.

For those of us not remotely interested in sitting down shouting for days on end, the WARC bands become a safe haven of relative peace and opportunity to make some good DX contacts.

VP8LIZ - radio wave's view of the Lady Elizabeth lying aground in the Falklands.

Special event callsign VP8LIZ from the Falkland Islands found themselves on 12m, no doubt as a result of the contests elsewhere, but to very good effect because the pile up they were running was huge!  Propagation was pretty rubbish on the Saturday, but the following day, it picked up a little.  VP8LP, Bob, was running the show and although I've contacted him many times before, a QSO with one of our outlying (and disputed by some) islands is always a special thing.

I'm not really kitted-out for 12m, though my trusty 20m delta will match up nicely, with some respectable gain on that band.  But the pattern is a little distorted and becomes more like a figure of eight, which put Bob out of my line of fire.

Still, verticals do very well from this open, elevated and high-metal ground QTH of mine, so I pulled out some Flexweave, an antenna wire that is much too heavy and prone to entanglement to my mind, and put it to use as a 12m vertical dipole stuck to a well-used 9m total length fishing pole.  Feed was 300 Ohm twin to my ATU, with a homemade dipole centre (i.e. some wood and cable ties.)  Twin is really great because the losses, even at very high SWR values, is very low indeed, way way below even the best coax can manage and typically just a fraction of a decibel.  That's ideal for when you're in a hurry to make an antenna and don't want to spend an hour trimming.

There you go.  Low angle 12m DX antenna for peanuts made in minutes. 

So, the pile up to VP8LIZ was running wild.  Shouting, shouting and responding to callsigns not even remotely like the one being asked for continued.  Bob, being a stoical, windswept islander, kept his cool as though none of it was happening, the very model of how to operate professionally.  One trick most didn't understand was that Bob is strict on who he responds to.  One call, and he might get back to you.  Make three calls one after the other, you can forget it!  And so it should be.

I got through to the Falklands - that's 7890 miles - during appalling propagation conditions (all bands red 'poor' on QRZ!) in about three or four calls using nothing more than two pieces of approximately-cut wire running 100W SSB.  For those who want to make one, try two pieces 3m long each to start with, then snip down if you want.  Using a 10m fishing pole with the top section removed, you get a dipole for 12m with a base height of about 3.5m, allowing for a bit of upping of the pole in fixing it to a fence post or similar.)

So there you go.  Puts the lie to all those wild claims about "true aircraft alloys", "no radials needed" and "covers all bands" that seek to justify several hundred dollars for what is rarely anything much more complicated, at least in principle.   If you like going portable to the beach, vertical dipoles are the informed DXpeditioners antenna of choice, though for 20m and thereabouts, you will have to load one unless you have a stupidly tall pole and not a breath of wind.  You can find a good version of that in an earlier post here.

Go on.  Get yourself some wire and make an antenna for pennies (or cents!)