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My Buddipole Antenna, Configured as a 2 Element Yagi for 6 Meters

The ribbons are to keep me from poking my eyes out on the end of the whips.

Here, I’m trying the antenna out in my driveway before I take it to the beach.

Kx3 QRP Radio 

Six Meter Summer!

This pavilion is my favorite operating spot at Hagen’s Cove. 

It overlooks Dead Man’s Bay, on the Gulf of Mexico in Perry Florida.

I’m going to spend the summer playing around with my Kx3 on 6 meters. The antenna here is a Buddipole, configured as a 2 element Yagi. Its easy to assemble in the field, so I’ll take it to the beach (Hagen’s Cove) and try to make some contacts with it. I’ve been a ham for 22 years but have never done much with 6 meters. This will be a 6 meter summer for me. Join me, I’d love to have a ham radio buddy to share the adventure with.

de AA1IK, 73

Summer arrived with a vengeance in Central New Jersey. Temperatures in the 80s (29C) with the higher humidity and stickiness that accompanies it. But it made for a great opportunity to head out to the park for some QRPing during lunch break. Besides the warmth, the skies were sunny and clear, with just a few white puffy clouds floating by.

Wanting to set up the fastest today in order to get the maximum operating time, I decided to go with the Buddistick on the magmount on top of the Jeep.  From the time I put the Jeep in park and turn off the ignition, I can be on the air in well under five minutes. Today was no exception.  The Buddistick is exceptionally easy to set up when using the top of the Jeep as a ground plane.  It goes together as magmount, two 11 inch arms, coil, and whip.  The whip gets extended all the way and the one coil setting works well for both 20 and 17 Meters.  The KX3’s autotuner gets a 1:1 match without breaking a sweat.

First up was Pertti OG2W in Finland on 17 Meters.  He was by far the loudest signal on the band and was a relatively easy catch even with 5 Watts.  From there, I went on over to 20 Meters and called CQ near the 14.060 MHz QRP watering hole.  To my delight, I was answered by fellow blogger, Greg N4KGL.  Greg was also using a KX3, but had his going to an Alex Loop.  Greg lives down in Panama City, Florida and started out at 559.  There was some QSB and at times the APF function on the KX3 was a big help.  Towards the end of our QSO, Greg was approaching 579. He was on lunch break also, and had to get going just as I did.

But as we all know, QRPing in the great outdoors can really be addicting, so I hopped on back over to 17 Meters for one last, quick listen.  Before I tore the station down and headed back to work, I was able snag Bob WP2XX down in the US Virgin Islands.

Three lunchtime QSOs – two DX contacts and a rag chew really made my day.  An added bonus was watching the RC Model airplane pilots doing their thing while I operated.  These guys are really good and I was treated to barrel rolls, Immelmans and vertical climbs as I worked the world with my radio.

I think tomorrow is supposed to have more of the same weather.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

I just finished a contact with a very loud Austrian station, OE3DIA on 10 metres, who took time out while working a string of stations to give me a complimentary audio report, quite unsolicited. It’s good when that happens! The comment was “Very nice audio cutting through the QRM” I was using the K3 at 80 watts and the mike was one of those Heil mikes with the dual insert, set to “narrow”. The K3 transmit audio equalisation is factory standard, in other words flat.

As it happens I had just been doing some audio comparisons between the KX3 and the FT-817. There has been a thread going on the KX3 Yahoo group started by a disenchanted American ham who claims that the FT-817 has punchier audio than the KX3. It’s rubbish, to put it politely. The KX3 has a built-in speech compressor, while my 817 has an RF processor made by Joachim, DF4ZS (more details on my FT-817 page) built into the microphone. Without it there is just no comparison.

I recorded some audio clips so you can hear for yourself:

• FT-817 with standard microphone, no compression
• FT-817 with standard microphone and DF4ZS compressor
• KX3 with MH3 microphone, mic gain and compression both set to 30

There is a bit of distortion on those clips which was not noticeable when listening on the radio. I think I might have a problem with my sound card.

I’m not sure if the difference are that noticeable in those clips, but when you look at the needle of the power meter the KX3 certainly has the more punchy signal.

Both the FT-817 and the KX3 were running off 13.8V and set to 5 watts output. I couldn’t compare them on battery power as I don’t have the charger board for the KX3 and the external battery pack (10xAA NiMH cells) I intended to use appears to be past it and the KX3 kept cutting out on voice peaks.