QSOs on 20/30/40m

I have been running a center-fed dipole antenna in my bonus room while I work on finishing my unfinished storage room for my ham shack and putting antennas in my attic.  With this temporary antenna setup I'm sticking to digital modes and <=10W of power.  20M meters was great on FT8 and I've extended my dipole for 40m and was able to still tune 20M and surprisingly 30M.  The room and space is not great so reception for 40M has not exceeded 700 miles.  While on 20M I have received as far as 4400 miles.  But the long term plan I hope is the Slinktenna  that I am waiting to be shipped.

With my new vanity call sign I'm starting today with WSPR transmissions on 40M and see how the dipole is doing.  I will catch a screen capture of my performance today from pskreporter and add to this post.

K4RUF Vanity Callsign

Just received confirmation from FCC that my vanity callsign was issued - K4RUF.  Now I've learned more patience as I try to update various entities as LoTW, QRZ, eQSL.  Hope to be on the air soon with the new callsign.

Digital Modes Are Alive

I recently got my HF radio off eBay and ending going with a Yaesu FT-991 (not the "a").  Cost was a factor and very good portability for a full 100W 6-160m rig.  So the first thing I did was string up a 10m dipole in my bonus room.  This was great and I could RX in 20/40/80m but little to no activity on 10m so therefore no TX :-(.

So I decided to double the length of the dipole to support 20m and go digital.  This made sense as I wanted to keep with 5-10W as the antenna was in the same room as I was.  Now here is where the decision to with the FT-991 came in real handy as it supported digital modes via its USB connection natively to your PC.

So got the dipole extended and installed WSJT-X on my Ubuntu laptop and tuned up to <1.1:1 SWR.  BTW the dipole has a 1:1 BALUN that I built from a kit on Amazon.  I started experimenting with FT8 initially and after watching some QSOs take place on 20m I decided to dive in and send out my first CQ @5W.  Whoa, I immediately got and response and watched as the software handled the rest with the designed automation to exchange SNR and GRID info.  And like that I had my first QSO and logged it to CQRLOG.  I later setup WSJT-X to log automatically to CQRLOG.

In a 3 day period I was able to perform 78 QSOs all to unique callsigns including some DXs to Canada, France, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Spain, Dominica, Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela.  The farthest QSO was Brazil @4160 mi or 6696 Km which sounds better!

My last highlight before signing off on the second day was I made a QSO and POTA spot for a ham in Washington state that was 2398 mi away.  This was a really great QSO that I also spotted on pota.us and confirmed with the same person on the facebook digital POTA group!  Nice!