Adventioneering

I live in an apartment complex, which precludes a fancy antenna installation, and the usual tricks like stringing a dipole up in my living room have produced mediocre results. No, if I’m to have fun with amateur radio I need to combine it with my adventure time. Besides what better way to while away campfire time than fiddling with a radio.

This necessitates putting together a field rig. Luckily I already have a Yaesu FT-857D which seems to be a pretty good rig for this kind of work. I also happen to have an ATAS-120A, an antenna that depending on who you talk to is either really awesome or really lousy.

Yaesu sells a field counterpoise kit for the ATAS-120 which by all accounts sucks. I am not sure if this is true or not, just, that’s the anecdotal opinion on the Internet. The people having good success are making their own counterpoises out of bunches of wire. I figured that actually getting the antenna in the air would be a good start.

I have a bunch of tripods for various photography strobes and things, so I grabbed one of the higher ones and fashioned a “mount” for the antenna by knocking out one of the smaller holes in a electrical box from Home Depot and through-mounting a SO-129 lead. The ATAS screws onto this, and then I ran a ground lead (required for it to tune).

I went out to the high end of the complex where we’re actually pretty high and unobstructed. The signal traffic was as thick as I could have wanted, and we copied stations on 40M CW and Phone from Texas, Ohio, Georgia, Maryland, and Florida.

I ran the rig off a set of jumper cables (I know, I don’t have Anderson powerpoles run in the Jeep like I did in the Land Rover) which was hokey but worked fine. The biggest problem is we were basically operating off the ground; next time a foldy table and chairs, and more proper power cabling will make it much more pleasant. Ham Radio Deluxe had no problem working in the field, and we got some good CW copy that way.

Photos Here.