winter field day

Shack Shakeup Continues

I have a stable of radios. I like radios. I have spent the past couple of years going through radios and finding the ones I like to use. I think I am getting close. In the shack, I like my IC-7610 and TS-890. They are big and all the controls I use are easy to get to. There performance is top notch. I am content.

QRP radios. This has been my greatest controversy. When I retired, I thought I was going to do a lot of QRP with little radios and maybe even do some SOTA. It didn’t turn out that way. I found myself using big radios at low power. They are easy to use and because of their heatsinks, they never overheat at low power. I did keep one little radio the IC-705, of all the little radios I had, the 705 was the one I grabbed the most.

Field radios. I went through a bunch of radios here too. I kept my IC-7300 which I bought new and has stayed with me over the years. I may sell it off for the new IC-7300MK2. I recently acquired a TS-590sg which went with me on my recent POTA activation at Black Rock Mountain State Park.

It was definitely a fun radio and I look forward to using it more in the future. Yesterday, an IC-7200 was delivered by UPS. The was a trade I had in the works. I always wanted an IC-7200. It’s a basic radio that has a military vibe to it. Being a Veteran, it appealed to me. The radio came with the rails and the MARS mod was already done. The radio is pristine. Power draw at idle is about 1 amp and at 20 watts it draws about 8 amps. Lowering the power level does not overly change the amp draw. Above 20 watts and the amp draw increases. Twenty watts is the happy medium. Here in the shack I had it turned on and was able to work N0SA. I have a set of his SOTA paddles from his last run before he retired. They are fun to use. I plan on taking the 7200 on my next POTA adventure.

During the past couple of years after making many POTA activations, Field Days (winter and summer), Army MARS, and SHARES I was able to shape how I operate. Some of it was a surprise as I was led in a different direction than when I started. I guess when it comes to radios, I may march to the beat of a different drummer. I prefer big radios (IC-7300 size) over little radios. I like that the controls are easier to get to and they don’t overheat. In the field I usually run around 20-35 watts. Most of the time I am in my micro-camper so I am not carrying the radios very far. I may have to lug them 50 feet to a picnic table. I recently bought one of those folding wagons so weight is no problem.

Another surprise was my use of FT8. Band conditions on many of my outings was poor. If it wasn’t for FT8, I may not have had a valid activation. Plus, I discovered I could work a lot of DX while in a park using FT8.

Yaesu’s. I don’t have any Yaesu’s. I have tried to like them, but they are just not for me. I had an FTDX10 for about 18 months, a FT-710 for about a year total, and a FTX1 for a couple of months. To me they are kind of quirky. The Icom’s and the Kenwood’s are solid performers and the ergonomics are superior. I know how to make them dance and sing. I know there are those who love Yaesu and I get it. To each his own. Find the radios that suit you best and enjoy them as I have. The journey is half the fun. 73 de Scott

Winter Field Day 2025

It was another fun Winter Field Day. Our club, we like to do 3 things: 1) we like to talk, 2) we like to eat, and 3) every once in a while we like to talk on the radio. This year was no different. We had a lot of fun, ate good food, and played on the radios. I think it’s the non-competitive spirit that helps us brave the cold weather. And it was cold this year with temps in the 20’s and 30’s. Not only does this tax our physical comfort, it also taxes our equipment.

Coax cables and extension cords were stiff and fingers went numb but we managed to get 4 stations on the air. I operated separate from the group to try to Get multipliers on JS8Call. I also copied the WFD bulletin and used Winlink to send and receive email. We had one member attempt to make a satellite contact and while he could hear other stations, it appeared no one was connecting. This year we ran QRP. Which was fun. Let me run through the gear and tell you how things worked.

The antenna this year was a 73’ inverted L with the vertical leg at 20 feet. This had a 60’ counterpoise connected to 1.5 KW Palomar Engineering 9:1 UnUn. I use the bigger UnUn because times when I run higher power (up to 40 watts) using digital, smaller UnUns get warm and saturated. This antenna works well down to 160 meters. I made contacts on different bands out to the west coast. A fail I had was I used a Chameleon RF choke next to the UnUn. It blocked all of the signal to the radio. Once I removed it, things were fine.

The radio was my new Yaesu FT-710. The radio worked well with no real issues. A quirk of the radio is the AF cuts the volume off louder than other radios. Sometimes when I am operating digital, I like to turn the audio volume real low so I can just barely hear it to keep tabs on what is going on. With the FT-710, it cuts off the volume while it is still louder than I like. Not a deal breaker. One of the benefits of operating a big radio QRP is the controls are easier to get to. While I prefer the ergonomics of Icom radios, the FT-710 is still pretty good. Another quirk with the FT-710 is the waterfall. It is not averaging like other radios, you have to adjust it manually. Overall, the radio performed well and compares favorably with the IC-7300. Either radio will equally get the job done. This radio feels more refined than my first one. It will be going on several more trips I have planned.

FT-710 accessories. I got the tuner issue worked out and my LDG tuner is playing well with the 710. I added Portable Zero rails which not only protects the sticky-outy things, but gives extra finger holds. I consider the rails a must have for portable big radios. Heil Proset Elite. I had to buy another headset for the FT-710 and the Elite was on sale at HRO. My Icoms use an electret mic which requires power. I already had an adapter from when I owned an FTDX10. I’ve been using Heil products for 25+ years and they are my goto. Mouse. I bought a Logitech M310 mouse to go the FT-710 thinking it might be easier to navigate through the menus. However, once I got the radio setup I was only changing a few things and found I didn’t use the mouse at all. I will probably not use a mouse with the 710 and I already found another use for it.

Maestro Evolve III laptop. I think I paid $122 for it. It works okay. It’s not zippy fast but all the software I used worked. It does appear to be RF sensitive though. During transmit, the mouse would freeze and sometimes the app window would close and open. What do you expect for a hundred bucks! One thing I did find annoying was the track pad. It was overly sensitive and would often treat a light touch as an “execute” function doing something I didn’t want it to do. My solution is to take the Logitech M310 mouse and use it with the Evolve III. A cool feature is I can run the Evolve off of my radio power supply or battery. Less “stuff” to deal with. The power plug for the Evolve also fits older Icom and Kenwood HT’s. The Evolve worked with my GPS receiver and I was able to easily sync the time for JS8Call. I will be taking this little laptop out again.

JS8Call. I think this will be the last time I use JS8Call. I was never fond of it and running a contest with it is almost a nightmare. For WFD, it doesn’t sync well with ACLog. People would send their Class and section info out without attaching a call sign to it so you would get something like 1O OH… and nothing else. That would be okay if only one person does it but when 2 or 3 others do it at the same time, you don’t know who is who. That and there wasn’t really enough JS8Call stations on the air to make it worthwhile. CW was the same for WFD. There were other contests going on. It appears the money maker for WFD is SSB. Which is interesting because the EmComm community relies heavily on digital modes.

As a group, we had a lot of fun. We always enjoy getting together. I had fun and I got to test my equipment. It is reassuring to have the knowledge that your equipment is ready. Even when I go on one of my FunComm trips, I load things up and go. I don’t have to check them because I already did. Final thoughts? Listening to the CW contests over the weekend reinvigorated my love for CW. I have been away from it while getting up to speed with MARS and SHARES, but there is still something to be said for the simplicity of me and the key. Hopefully, this will be a better year than last year, and I can get back into the swing of things. Stay safe, stay warm es 72 de Scott

Deja Vu all over again

The 2025 promises to be a better year. I am looking forward to being more radio-active. I am also looking forward to more blogging and more vlogging. I am hoping to undertake some long term reviews. I have two in mind. One is going to be a Maestro Evolve III laptop computer. I know a lot of hams use them so I thought I would give one a whirl. My other project is going to be another Yaesu FT710, this time the field version. I last owned one about a year and a half ago, I traded it off after a few months of use. The radio was going through some growing pains and was probably not ready for prime time. My general thoughts back then was the radio was a likable and fun radio and compared favorably to my IC-7300. I thought I would give it another look and a fair shake since it’s been through a few firmware updates since its release in 2022.

I am hoping this FT-710 is more polished than my first one. I can see at least two firmware updates since my last 710 and the manual has been updated. Hopefully Yaesu cured those early issues. I picked up the radio yesterday. I plan on using it as a field radio for POTA activations as well as for Winter Field Day and Field day with my club. In general the IC-7300 and the FT-710 are comparable, each with their pluses and minuses. Whichever brand you are married to, either radio will probably serve you equally well. One reason I got this radio is there are many members in my club that use Yaesu radios. Having familiarity with the Yaesu system allows me to help them with their radio problems.

My initial thoughts are similar to the ones I had a year and a half ago. It is a likable radio and it has a certain fun factor. I am going through my past blog posts and YouTube videos to make list of things I found with my first FT710 and see if they have been corrected. I will also post the settings I changed on the new radio to suit me.

I like big radios when I go camping or even on POTA day trips. I like having the controls I use handy and if band conditions get ugly, I can turn up the power. I normally run 20-25 watts for CW and digital. The rare times I am on SSB, I may go as high as 50 watts. Another plus with a big radio is I can run digital modes all day long and it will not overheat the radio. I do have a couple of QRP radios and I do take them out for a spin every now and again; but I can just as easily turn my big radio down to 5 watts. I am looking forward to using it in the upcoming Winter Field Day. 73 de Scott

Winter Field Day 2024

This Winter Field Day (WFD) I operated with the West Georgia Amateur Radio Society. I am one of two CW ops so I got to play CW. We operated under W4F. I typically operate away from the main group so I won’t QRM them. This gives me the latitude to switch bands at will. My purpose is to get multipilers. You get a multpier from working each band. I managed 5 bands. Six meters never came up and I had no takers on 160 meters. Friday night and Saturday morning, prior to WFD, I made a few POTA contacts, had two CW QSO’s and managed to get France on 10 meters. So the antenna was working.

About the club, in general, we are not hard core contesters. We like to do these events for three reasons, we like to socialize, eat, and play on the radio, often in that order. Saturday, John WD8LQT made chili. Along with the chili, we had hotdogs, coleslaw, and various condimets and snacks. My wife Mary K4SEZ, made Graham Cracker Cookies, a club favorite.

I went QRV at 1400 hrs. eastern on saturday. CW during WFD can be a challenge. There are some really good ops that can zip along at 25-30 wpm. I am not one of them. I can usually get the exchnge if I listen to them call a few times. I can send between 16-22 wpm. Sometimes I felt like I was standing still at 22 wpm with these ops at high speed. A lot of times CW ops are operating portable and QRP or low power. I made many contacts with the S-meter not budging off of zero. We also had a lot of QSB and some QRN. You could see the QSB come and go on the waterfall. It was a bit of a challenge, but I felt WFD helped me realize how my CW Innovations class has already helped me. I was able to copy the QRQ stations better than I have in the past. I eneded up making 45+ contacts mainly by search and pounce. I didn’t think I would do well running a frequency — yet. I went QRT about 2200 hrs. eastern Saturday night. I had to leave early Sunday morning so my wife could get to church on time.

Equipment: My antenna was my Chameleon EmComm II ver.1. I ran a 60′ wire in an inverted L withe a 20′ vertical section using my push-up pole and tying off the other end to a pine tree. I had a 50′ counterpoise underneath the antenna. The antenna played well. I have no complaints, it did what it was supposed to do. I think it will be my WFD/FD antenna if I have the space to set it up. The radio was 2nd Peter, my IC-7300. I was running between 35-50 watts. The radio purred along and never missed a beat. I love my 7300’s. I always say that if I could only have one radio, the IC-7300 would be it. For paddles, I used my Begali Expedition. It’s a nice heavy paddle that doesn’t move and is silky smooth. Logging was handled by ACLog WFD edition on my Lenovo Thinkpad.

Everything worked as advertised, so no real changes need to be made to the radios and related gear. We did talk about getting a MESH network between me and the base camp so we can network my computer with theirs. All in all, it was a good time. I got to see folks I don’t see very often, ate good food and ran some CW on the radio. The QSO map is my contacts only. The club is still operating as I write this. 73 – de Scott

Winter Field Day

This year the West Georgia Amateur Radio Society (WGARS) decided to hold winter field day at Little Tallapoosa Park in Carroll County, GA. I would call the event semi-serious. I don’t think any of us are real hard-core contesters, but some of us watch the numbers. The majority of our members operate using SSB and I was the only one operating CW. The plan was for me to get as many bands as I could for multipliers. That meant I had to be able to swap bands fairly quickly in order to advantage of changing band conditions. We had five stations set up, 4 of which had bandpass filters. Because I didn’t have any bandpass filters I was located about 100 yards away from the main group.

Gear. I brought the FTDX10 with me to see how it would do in a semi-contest environment. It fed a Mat Tuner, Mat-30 tuner, and then to my 29-foot random wire antenna. This has become my favorite antenna. I logged with N3FJP WFD software and used a K1EL keyer. The computer and radio were powered by a Honda EU-2200 generator (we ran alternate power). This generator is very quiet and is very fuel efficient. The rest of my camper was fed with shore power at the campsite. I kept warm with a little ceramic heater.

Operation. This year I tried something new. Not only did I use the N3FJP software for logging but I also used it to send CW, in other words, I did everything from the keyboard. I was a little apprehensive, aren’t we all when it comes to something new? But I found it worked quite well. Band conditions, on the other hand, were not that good. They were up and down with a lot of fade. By being able to jump around I was able to work 100 contacts on 5 different bands. I was hoping for more, but there weren’t a whole lot of stations out there to work. I thought it might have been my station, but looking at the QSO Map, I was getting out okay.

Cold weather may have kept some CW ops at home. It gets harder to work a key or paddle when your hands are cold.

FTDX10. Part of my ongoing review of this radio. You really can’t get a feel for a radio or any piece of kit unless you use it over a period of time. My other radios are feeling the pain of neglect. How did it do? Not bad really. I made an effort to try the CW decoder. There were times were I really needed it due to QSB (fading). Sometimes the band would drop as I was getting the exchange. The decoder often picked up what I missed. It is not a replacement for your ears and mind. But it did help and made me a little more efficient. My hearing is not that good. The decoder is sensitive to CW speed. It does best when it is close to the sender’s speed. I set the outer dial (MVLP) to CW speed for this purpose. While I normally set the function knob to RF power, because band conditions were so variable, I set it to level (waterfall level) which allowed me to adjust the waterfall as needed. The radio performed well and I appreciate the roofing filters. I had one issue and that was I would tune across the band and about every 10 KC the waterfall would go dark and I would have to retune the antenna system. That became rather annoying. There is an example of what was going on in the activation video below. Very quickly, I got a response from one of my subscribers stating that it was the tuner and not the radio. This morning, I broke out the radio and tested it with the Mat-30 to make sure I still had the problem here at home (I did). I then swapped the Mat-30 for my old LDG Z-11 Pro and viola! The problem disappeared. You can see the results in the second video.

I think my club as a whole had a good time. It is fun to get and socialize, plus throw in a little operating. When testing a radio, or any piece of kit, You can’t really do it justice over a couple of days. I’ve had the radio for a couple of months, and as I work through the issues, I find that sometimes we don’t know each other that well yet. It’s still early in the dance. I will say that I am warming up to the radio more than I thought but I still say that if I had to choose between it and the 7300, the 7300 would still be my choice. However, that gap is getting narrower. If Yaesu would make a few software upgrades…