Getting on the air. April 17, 2008
Posted by n9ik in operating, portable, station.Tags: blt, cw, keys, portable, qrp, rockmite, station
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I finally got an antenna in the air temporarily this afternoon, and got out my RockMite 40, BLT and Nye Master Key. The 40 meter band seemed very active; at least there was lots of activity around 7.030 MHz, which is the frequency of the crystals currently installed in the RockMite. Everyone that I heard was a bit fast for me; I was able to copy only about 15% or 20% of what I was hearing.Most of the calls that I was able to copy were in 4-land. One person was having a ball with his “bug” slowed down to about 15 wpm - I forgot to write down their call, but they had a very distinctive “fist”, with comparatively long dashes.
The photo above shows my portable station: Battery pack with 8 “AA” cells, RockMite transceiver on 7.030 MHz, Nye-Viking Master Key (model 330-001), NorCal BLT (Balanced Line Tuner) modified to also tune unbalanced feed lines, and my cheap, worn-out Koss UR/29 headphones. The BLT is feeding a speaker-wire doublet as an “inverted-V” with the apex up only about 25 feet or so. The tuner handled it easily.
What a great article for QRP. Probably the most expensive thing was the headset. hihi. Wondering how long to build? Interesting reading.
73s
Thanks for the comment! You’re almost right… actually the most expensive part of the station in the picture is the straight key. The headphones were bought at Wal-Mart at least eight years ago for about $30.00 dollars.
If you’re interested you can read more about my building of the RockMite and BLT here on my blog at http://n9ik.wordpress.com/category/qrp/. Both took several hours each, spread over a couple of evenings, mostly because of my problem with shaky hands.