A very sunny but, in exposed places, very cold day today. Even the local swan community was fed-up of the wind and waves! Son out skateboarding, so a couple of hours to kill with the radio at a local lake. Earlier work showed freshwater situations yield good signal enhancements.
If you live in the northerly latitudes, you'll know that colour of sky and water means it's cold! |
For sure, the LiFePO4 battery is a great asset to backpacking; I can walk pretty much any distance now with the full kit. I managed over a kilometre quite comfortably the other day. What I couldn't manage today was not getting a very wet foot, trying to install a radial tent peg!
Well, conditions were very poor after a G3 event overnight (still ~G1 at time of writing). I wasn't getting out very far, but then again, neither was I at home, with ~35W and a vertical delta; in fact, I was getting out a lot worse from home, and the 20m band WSPR waterfall was almost empty:
Send/Receive spots on 15m, from home, ~35W, vertical delta loop. Not very good today! |
Black coating for a radio is not a good colour for portable - it can get very hot! The case is a good shade. |
Here's what I managed on transmit from the lake (~3W, 1/4 wave vertical):
And here's what I managed on receive:
It's a pity that JT65 and JT9 are now out of fashion, because the possibilities with those modes on QRP are much better than with FT8.
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