Sunday, December 17, 2006
The Elecraft KX-1 radio arrived on Friday (as per previous email).
Powered it up yesterday, but finally got enough time to try to get it on the air this evening.
Decided to try "armchair copy." Cut a 44' doublet out of some speaker twinlead and ran it though the house (my wife was laughing at me).
I heard a couple of stations on 40m & 80m. 30m and 20m were dead at 22:30 PST, imagine that.
The short story is that the SWR (not to mention antenna position) was unacceptable at 40m. There were indications that one station was able to hear me, but not very well.
Will take it to work with me tomorrow and put the doublet WAY up a tree and see if that does any better. (Darn solar flares and CME causing dead bands...)
Will report more later.
Powered it up yesterday, but finally got enough time to try to get it on the air this evening.
Decided to try "armchair copy." Cut a 44' doublet out of some speaker twinlead and ran it though the house (my wife was laughing at me).
I heard a couple of stations on 40m & 80m. 30m and 20m were dead at 22:30 PST, imagine that.
The short story is that the SWR (not to mention antenna position) was unacceptable at 40m. There were indications that one station was able to hear me, but not very well.
Will take it to work with me tomorrow and put the doublet WAY up a tree and see if that does any better. (Darn solar flares and CME causing dead bands...)
Will report more later.
