W0CZ camping notes

[Kenneth Christiansen]

Hi to the group

I have been busy camping with my KX3,KXPA100, 12 volt battery and solar power. I will comment on things that have worked out well for me.

I have a 16 foot Scamp travel trailer. There are pictures on QRZ.COM for W0CZ

My antenna is a vertical which is 33 ft of speaker wire supported by a MFJ-1910 pole on the drawbar of my camper. I mounted a DX Engineering MAXI-CORE HIGH POWER MULTI-BAND UNUN DXE-UN-43 to the frame of the camper with the antenna to the +terminal and the frame of the camper to the - terminal. I ran 6 ft of RG8X to the KXPA100 with built in tuner and the KX3. My battery is a 110 amp deep discharge wet cell. The solar panel is 100 watts from Home Depot and I have a simple solar regulator the switches off at 14 volts DC and on at a lower voltage.

I find at 100 watts in bright sunlight the solar charges at about 4 amps while I am sending CW and drops back to almost nothing when I am receiving. I can discharge the battery on the air in the evening and if there is sunlight it charges back up in a few hours in the morning.

I ran 1B-ND at 5 watts battery and solar for field day. I had 174 contacts using all bands 80, 40,20,15, and 10. My furthest contact was Hawaii from North Dakota on 20. I felt the antenna did a good job on each band using only 5 watts.

I am camping at Lake Bemidji. State park in MN this week end. This morning I added a loading coil for 160 meters to this antenna and worked WB0BIN in Sabin, MN at 8:30AM. He is about 100 miles away and it was weak copy for both of us with 100 watts of SSB on each end but we talked for about 20 minutes.

I do not use a loading coil on any band other than 160 although I could use it on 80.

One final thing. There was talk on this reflector earlier about the noise potential for Honda generators. The big camper beside me brought a Honda 3000 generator and has run it off and on all week end. He has it located about 20 ft from my antenna. I find there are powerful places of noise about 5 kHz wide that run about an S8 or -80 on my PX3. Away from these spots my noise is S0 to S1 with -115 to -105 on my PX3. These spots drift around when he first turns it on but than they tend to stay in one part of the band. The noise peaks were about 27 kHz apart. That may be one reason some people say the Honda makes a lot of noise and others do not see the noise. If the noise is where you want to work that is not good. I have been making contacts where the noise is low all week end. I am also finding no noise on 20 CW so maybe the higher frequencies are filtered.

In summary. My only major change to my system this year is the DX#-UN-43 and I feel it has made my antenna work much better. I base my opinion on all the contacts I am making easily on all bands this year compared to the frustration I had the last two years. Yesterday I worked a ham in Missouri running an MFJ-9020 at 5 watts and a vertical. We had a 45 minute QSO and that was before the Honda came. I ran the KX3 with preamp on, attenuator off and AF gain at 60 but we made it and I thought that was a good indication of the natural low noise level in the park. I have worked several 100 watt stations using dipoles and verticals and we are having about equal copy both directions.

73 and feel free to try or not any of my ideas.

Ken. W0CZ
w0cz at i29 dot net

Sent from my iPad


Sent from my iPad
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[Igor Sokolov-2]

Ken,

Thanks for sharing your ideas and experience. Some optimistic figures
you give pose some additional questions though. Since you say the solar
panel gives you 4 amp at 14v in bright sunlight, it means you get about
56W from the 100W panel. Is that right?

Then your battery of 110 amp can probably be used down to it's half
capacity (55 AH). To charge it back to full capacity with 4A panel you
need at least 13 hours of bright sunlight e.g the whole day rather then
few hours in the morning.

Regarding Honda noise it may well be that you hear noise of some device
powered by Honda rather then Honda gen itself. Cellphone charger can
easily produce bursts of noise spaced 27KHz apart. Are you sure the
generator itself is the source of noise?


73, Igor UA9CDC




04.07.2017 5:04, Kenneth Christiansen пишет:

> Hi to the group
>
> I have been busy camping with my KX3,KXPA100, 12 volt battery and solar power. I will comment on things that have worked out well for me.
>
> I have a 16 foot Scamp travel trailer. There are pictures on QRZ.COM for W0CZ
>
> My antenna is a vertical which is 33 ft of speaker wire supported by a MFJ-1910 pole on the drawbar of my camper. I mounted a DX Engineering MAXI-CORE HIGH POWER MULTI-BAND UNUN DXE-UN-43 to the frame of the camper with the antenna to the +terminal and the frame of the camper to the - terminal. I ran 6 ft of RG8X to the KXPA100 with built in tuner and the KX3. My battery is a 110 amp deep discharge wet cell. The solar panel is 100 watts from Home Depot and I have a simple solar regulator the switches off at 14 volts DC and on at a lower voltage.
>
> I find at 100 watts in bright sunlight the solar charges at about 4 amps while I am sending CW and drops back to almost nothing when I am receiving. I can discharge the battery on the air in the evening and if there is sunlight it charges back up in a few hours in the morning.
>
> I ran 1B-ND at 5 watts battery and solar for field day. I had 174 contacts using all bands 80, 40,20,15, and 10. My furthest contact was Hawaii from North Dakota on 20. I felt the antenna did a good job on each band using only 5 watts.
>
> I am camping at Lake Bemidji. State park in MN this week end. This morning I added a loading coil for 160 meters to this antenna and worked WB0BIN in Sabin, MN at 8:30AM. He is about 100 miles away and it was weak copy for both of us with 100 watts of SSB on each end but we talked for about 20 minutes.
>
> I do not use a loading coil on any band other than 160 although I could use it on 80.
>
> One final thing. There was talk on this reflector earlier about the noise potential for Honda generators. The big camper beside me brought a Honda 3000 generator and has run it off and on all week end. He has it located about 20 ft from my antenna. I find there are powerful places of noise about 5 kHz wide that run about an S8 or -80 on my PX3. Away from these spots my noise is S0 to S1 with -115 to -105 on my PX3. These spots drift around when he first turns it on but than they tend to stay in one part of the band. The noise peaks were about 27 kHz apart. That may be one reason some people say the Honda makes a lot of noise and others do not see the noise. If the noise is where you want to work that is not good. I have been making contacts where the noise is low all week end. I am also finding no noise on 20 CW so maybe the higher frequencies are filtered.
>
> In summary. My only major change to my system this year is the DX#-UN-43 and I feel it has made my antenna work much better. I base my opinion on all the contacts I am making easily on all bands this year compared to the frustration I had the last two years. Yesterday I worked a ham in Missouri running an MFJ-9020 at 5 watts and a vertical. We had a 45 minute QSO and that was before the Honda came. I ran the KX3 with preamp on, attenuator off and AF gain at 60 but we made it and I thought that was a good indication of the natural low noise level in the park. I have worked several 100 watt stations using dipoles and verticals and we are having about equal copy both directions.
>
> 73 and feel free to try or not any of my ideas.
>
> Ken. W0CZ
> w0cz at i29 dot net
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
> ______________________________________________________________
> Elecraft mailing list
> Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft
> Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
> Post: mailto:[hidden email]
>
> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
> Message delivered to [hidden email]
>

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