Thanksgiving Weekend

During the Thanksgiving weekend, I got to play a little radio on 10 meters.

I hadn’t had great luck with my home brewed dipole, despite it coming in around 1.3 - 1.4 SWR. So I tried mounting my 10 meter hamstick on an old microphone stand with 4x 8 foot radials made out of cat5e network cables that I had striped the ends of and twisted all the wires together. The base of the hamstick was about 6 feet off the ground and the ends of the radials about 2 feet of the ground.

Unfortunately the best SWR I could manage was around 1.8. I wish I had taken a picture of the NanoVNA to show you to results. The graph formed a ‘W’ with the lowest two points stopping around 1.8 SWR so I adjusted the antenna to place lowest point around 28.300MHz.

With this setup I actually heard a lot more activity from my backyard than I ever had in the past and was able to make two contacts. This was around 12:50 and 13:38 so not the greatest time for 10 meters, so I’ve heard at least.

The first, and loudest, contact was K1LZ up in Massachusetts with a 59 both ways and the second to VE4XM (Brad) in Selkirk Manitoba which barely made it. At first Brad was around a 58 and he gave me a 51 but then the bands quickly dropped and he was a 51 as well.

All in all, a fun time. I’ve since talked with some of the local hams about my setup and there were several suggestions to try. One of which was to change out the radials. While it’s not shielded, not sure if having the twisted pairs would cause issues and/or having them all individually insulated…On one hand I want to think the twisted pairs should not affect the signal since they are all tied together on one end. I’ll be trying out a few other options when I have time to play with it.