Check this video out of a a Cushcraft Tri-band beam antenna going up at W3HAC in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC. K6ZO(Don) is the one doing the muscle work to get it in place.  This antenna will give W3HAC and the  HacDC  community a bigger “gun” for the upcoming CQ Worldwide DX Contest on 24-25 October 2015. Beyond DX contesting, this infrastructure will continue to put W3HAC on the map as a robust club station right in the middle of the nations’ capital.

Please check out HacDC Amateur Radio Club and HacDC particularly if you live in the Washington, DC area.  Beyond ham radio there are vibrant activities around 3D Printing, micro-controllers, electronics hacking, gaming, etc.

 

After an 30 minutes of trying last night on 20m to contact Pope Francis Special Event Station K3P,  we switched to 40m (7.070MHz) and made a successful and clear PSK31 QSO. KOO(Pat) was on the K3P end at the  HacDC hacker space in the Columbia Heights section of DC.

Purposefully finding someone on the air is not as easy as you think. I was beginning to wonder if I was too close(or not far enough away), but the propagation worked in our favor on 40m. In my initial search 40m for K3P I told contacts in other QSOs that I was trying to spot K3P; those operators then went on the hunt as well.

The result was a few “mini-pileups” as Pat called them into K3P. Happy to help get K3P and Pope Francis 😉 on the amateur radio map for the evening.

Finally. I just got the home HF station installed, obscured by an Ikea Hemnes secretary, and managed to make a few QSOs.

The only stressor(but does it need to be?) was getting the antenna built and setup. I settled on something that would be relatively quick to build and deploy. I had been researching antennas for quite some time and came across this popular end-fed design from EARCHI  that could be deployed quickly and was flexible with most of the bands.  

The biggest compromise in my implementation in this design is probably the clear plastic enclosure that you see here. It’s all I could scrounge, but it is doing the job of holding the components(wound toroid and terminals) together until I get something waterproof.

I was reincarnated as W7ZP on July 7, 2015; my previous call was KM4ITT . The vanity 1×2 and 2×1 signs for the “4” area(domiciled in East Tennessee) were hard to come by so I went with this one. It has a nice ring to it and sounds good in CW(so I am told).  Many thanks to K0OO and K6ZO for encouraging me to do this and helping me pick one with communicative qualities. AE7Q’s call sign lookup and application tracking tools were a huge help and proof that most problems have a clever solution somewhere out there.

As for the “7” and being from the “4” area,  I don’t think provincialism has done much for humankind. Now is the time to declare myself a citizen of the world.