Judy and I drove over to the beach today. It was glorious! We got lots of sun, had a fantastic walk, and I operated in the CWT sprint for a few minutes. The highlight of the operating was making a beach-to-beach QRP QSO with K4KRW in North Carolina.

We drove over to Rye Harbor in the morning and had a picnic lunch as soon as we arrived. Then we walked a couple of miles along the beach. After this Judy lay down on the shore to soak up some sun. I rode my bike about a half mile inland to play radio for a while. I’d brought a kite, but there wasn’t quite enough wind to lift an antenna… so I went in search of some trees. I found a wildlife area not too far from the road. A narrow path leads through the woods to a platform overlooking a beautiful inland marsh.

Except for the heat (high 80s in the shade), the spot was perfect. I had a 30 foot tree nearby and set up the wire as a sloper. The little deck even had a chair and a bench to operate on. I ran the KX3 on 20 meters and right away worked IK0YVV in Italy. Marco gave me a 559. Then I worked Gilly, WA5SNL in Texas. He also gave me a 559.

After signing I tuned up to the QRP frequency. K4KRW, Richard, was calling CQ. To my delight, he was operating from a beach in North Carolina with a KX3 and an end-fed wire. But… his wire was lifted by a kite! After arriving home, I found an email from Richard with a photo of his operating position.

We had a great QSO and exchanged 559 signal reports. What a thrill to work another KX3 operator on the beach!

Now the CWT sprint had started and I joined in. I only operated for 10 minutes, because by now my shirt was drenched and I’d had enough of this heat. Here’s my log. I’ve changed it to reflect the other station’s QTH instead of the CWOPS member number used in the real exchange:

19 Jul-17 1840 14.028 IK0YVV CW 559 579 Italy Marco
19 Jul-17 1848 14.029 WA5SNL CW 559 579 TX Gilly
19 Jul-17 1854 14.060 K4KRW CW 559 559 NC Richard
19 Jul-17 1902 14.036 AA3B CW 599 599 PA Bud
19 Jul-17 1903 14.035 K9CT CW 599 599 IL Craig
19 Jul-17 1903 14.034 AD8J CW 599 599 NC John
19 Jul-17 1905 14.032 K4RO CW 599 599 TN Kirk
19 Jul-17 1907 14.026 N4ZZ CW 599 599 TN Doc
19 Jul-17 1908 14.036 N2SR CW 599 599 NJ Tom
19 Jul-17 1909 14.034 NR4M CW 599 599 VA Steve

With this I packed up and headed back to Rye Harbor. This is really a beautiful spot. Wild rugosa roses form a hedge along the road and fill the air with fragrance. Next to the harbor is a little state park with facilities. It’s a perfect place to spend the day.

TX Factor goes digital as Mike Marsh gives Bob McCreadie an introduction to operating on DMR, Yaesu Fusion and D Star as part of his digital fun. In part one of the series, they take a trip to a local farm to see how an amateur has set up his own Fusion Gateway.

Ever wonder why QSL cards take a long time to complete their journey? Bob finds out what we can do to help speed up he process.

Pete visits Norwich to spend a day with the Norfolk Amateur Radio Club at their annual field day event, Radio Active to discover why they won the coveted prize of RSGB Large Club of The Year.

Episode 17 of TX Factor is now live at www.txfactor.co.uk

Happy Summer viewing!

TX Factor Team

The first antenna I put up after we moved in here was a simple 2×5 meter dipole sloping down from the roof into our garden. I wrote about it – and the noise it received – here

Last year summer I finally had time to do some maintenance on my old CB-whip and put it up on the sheet metal roof.

I put it up mainly to get my station licence, because the amount of noise it received on shortwave was as much as the dipole, hence I didn’t log many QSOs with it. Still, it turned out to be a marvelous antenna to do medium- and longwave DXing and I logged some 285 different NDBs on longwave in the last 12 months.

But now, this summer, it is time to get serious about putting up a decent antenna. Being a sensible guy I set myself some goals:

• The antenna has to be cut for the 20 meter band
• It has to have lower noise pickup than the rooftop vertical
• I have to use whatever materials I have lying around
• Money can only be spend on the odd nuts and bolts

Then there is the question on how to determine what is good, better and best. My thoughts were to use WSPR to monitor how well an antenna would receive. If you do this scientifically you use two identical setups with only one variable: the antenna. Unfortunately I don’t have two IC-7200s, so I decided to go for an alternate approach: day one the first antenna, the other day the other antenna. This adds the variable of different conditions during different days, but over the course of a week or two you will get a broad picture, I reckoned.

The first two antennas I compared were the rooftop vertical and the sloping dipole. They were both resonant on 20 meters and I used that bands WSPR frequency to compare. After comparing for two weeks I found only a minimal difference: they were equally good/bad. I did get consistent beacons from VY0ERC, though (probably the most northerly located amateur radio club in the world). But since there are only a limited number of WSPR stations on 20 meters I decided to switch to monitoring JT65 stations for the next comparison.

I had another CB whip laying around and after gutting it and adding two 5 meter radials I put it up in the far end of the garden. Now our garden is only 10 meters deep, but at least it is at some distance from any noise source in our house and the neighbours.

This time I only tested for 10 days, but again I didn’t notice much difference. Even though the rooftop vertical was noisier it would still receive all the JT65/JT9 stations the garden vertical could receive. It was only that I wandered up into the SSB portion of the 20 meter band that I noticed a difference. Comparing stations from Hong Kong, Japan and central Russia was like comparing night and day. Night being signals barely coming out of the noise, day being comfortable copy. The final confirmation came from my Olivia friend Ken in Japan. He calculated an +18 dB advantage of the garden vertical over the rooftop vertical during our most recent QSO.

So part 1 of our Antenna Summer has been a success in the fact that I now know that the garden is a better place for an antenna than the roof top. Less noise, stronger signals. But the question now arises: isn’t a metal roof a very good counterpoise and shouldn’t it be beneficial to the workings of antennas? Why does it degrade the performance of my rooftop vertical?