This weekend I went camping with friends Nick and Ed at Nick's property in Tioga County, PA for some good food, conversation, shooting, and off grid ham radio in the woods. Nick and I hold General class amateur radio licenses, whiled Ed got his Amateur Extra ticket.
Ed got upstate on Friday and so was able to setup early Saturday morning to check in with a CAP net. Unfortunately NVIS propagation on 80M wasn't good and he wasn't able to hear anyone. Ed's rig is a UK-surplus PRC-320 manpack HF radio. He likes the rugged nature and simple operation.
Meanwhile, Nick and I drove up separately on Saturday morning, arriving around 1530.
Saturday night was spent socializing with the locals and sitting around the fire with some bourbon and Baccarat Rothschild cigars.
Sunday morning we got a visitor: Chance the RF-Enabled Coyote Hunting Dog. He belongs to one of the locals and was out hunting with some pack mates when he caught wind of the sausages we were frying for breakfast. He was very friendly but as a pup, didn't want to return to his master when he got the return buzz through his collar, so we spoke to him when he came to retrieve the dog.
Attached File(The antenna is for a GPS-enabled tracker that also allows the owner to transmit a signal to the dog for him to return. The range is several miles.)
On Sunday we hoisted an 80M dipole antenna. But this wasn't an off the shelf antenna, or even a conventional homebrew dipole. Behold the Off-Grid Butterknife Dipole:
Attached File Attached FileWe constructed it from aluminum MIG welding wire with plastic butterknives as the center insulator and spaces for the open wire ladder line we fed it with from the antenna tuner.
To elevate the antenna we needed to get suspension lines over trees. To get the suspension lines up we attached fishing line running from a Zebco Dock Demon spincasting rod to an arrow and shot it over the trees on both ends.
Attached FileEd has NanoVNA vector network analyzer so he was able to determine at what the antenna was resonant. Before it was hoisted it was resonant at 3560 KHz on the 80M band, very close to what we wanted.
We tried the antenna with Nick's Icom 718 using an Icom AH-4 antenna tuner, as well as with my Icom 7200 with LDG IT-100 tuner feeding a 25 foot piece of coax connected to an LDG 4:1 balun.
Nick called CQ a few times and although we didn't get any replies we were able to confirm he was getting out to the surrounding several hundred miles via monitoring on WebSDR.