I was seeing posts on the Internet about how open 10m has been and really wanted to get in on the action, however I didn’t have any 10M antennas up. Then I remembered that due to a home improvement project I had discovered a cache of antenna parts that I had picked up from a CB guy. I’ll have to do a story on that soon.
So digging through the aluminum it looked like there were parts for a Hy-Gain AV-620 and AV-12AVQ. Well there was not a full AV-620 but I was in luck that the AV-12AVQ was complete! I did a quick cleaning of the traps, SO-238 connector and tightened all the clamps. Then pulled out my miniVNA and checked the tune on 10m. It was at 1.5:1 so I called it good. I’ll probably go back and try to tune it up a bit more but I was anxious to get on the air. I mounted it to a piece of fence rail I had and hooked up some coax. Got down in the shack and patched in my IC-7300 and tuned to 28.074 to see what FT8 looked like. The waterfall was packed one end to the other with signals. So I hopped on and starting cranking out QSOs. It didn’t take long to log over 60 stations! Mostly Europe and South America. Below is a cool map I was able to generate from the log file on https://qsomap.org/.
Quite the successful day. The next morning I got up before worked and checked and again it was wide open. I cranked out a bunch of new QSOs before having to head to work. It started with Europe and later to South America again and finally to Asia. I heard a few JA’s but was not able to work any of them unfortunately.
After reviewing my QSOs it was very apparent that I’m hearing but not getting out as well. It seems that I am about 10dB quieter than the signals I can hear. That definitely makes pretty much anything under -15 difficult if not impossible to complete. So it’s time to look at what I can do to improve things. One thing I did not do when I put up the antenna was add any radials. So my next project is to put up about eight 8′ 4″ radials for 10M. Eventually I’ll add 4-8 each for 15M and 20M. I’m hoping this will make a big improvement.
This spring I think I’ll add some kind of wire antenna for 10M. I’m interested in to see what the differences there may be with a different polarization. So far I’ve been impressed with the AV-12AVQ, especially since it was free to me and I’m glad I cleaned out the garage and found it! 🙂
Back to 10M. It’s hopping again so time to take advantage of it.
’73
Update:
The wild ride continues! Over 100 QSO’s from Japan/New Zeland to Russia and Africa.
