We try to visit Uetli twice a week - so far Tuesdays on bicycles and Thursdays on our own foots. Last Thursday we started from my home around 6p.m. with Oliver and Eduardo (friends).
Weather was oook in that moment but was raining before and some rain was expected later in the night. Well, one of the good things I had learned in this country is that "there is no bad weather, only inappropriate clothing" I had appropriate rain coat in my backpack so I seemd to be prepared. If that would be the only contents of my bagpack - that would be easy... No, together with the rain coat there were: KX3, power amplifier Midland 747B, MFJ antenna tunner, two Lipo batteries (3S, 2.2Ah) and buddipole antenna with 2.5m mast. This time no tripod which is nice and light as long as you didnt have to carry it on your own back 8 km (constantly up)...
this time climbing was harder than usual..
We reached "top of Zuerich" around 8pm. The view from there was spectacular as usual...
 |
| click to see full |
I mentioned last time that one of aims to go there is to spend some time with friends and - as everybody knows - the time is even nicer when some beer(s) are involved - we couldn't resist also this time. So beer was involved and finally I started my radio activities some time later...
I also mentioned that I had spent some time the day before checking that I don't miss any important cable, element etc. Yeeees. I checked all the cables that I usually forget (connecting radio with amplifier or changer PL/BNC). This time I had everything except ... central element of Buddipole.
Without this element Buddipole antenna just doesn't exist. At the beginning I wanted to build any antenna from some piece of wire but I didnt have any... Finally I managed to connect both arms of Buddipole directly with the cable. That definitely was not perfect as both arms touched the bench however such built antenna could be tuned and I did even some QSO.
The propagation was not exciting this day or just my new antenna was just deaf... I did one nice QSO with Marco HB9ZAG. Maybe it was not DX (abt 20km) but at least I had opportunity to test this specific setup - power amplifier powered by Lipo battery. Definitely such setup works - the only problem is for how long Lipo battery can last. It is only 2.2Ah and amp returns something abt 100w... The good side of such batteries is high possible current (in this case - 2.2Ah - 20C - 12.6V - even 40A !!!). The bad side is that they explode sometimes.. (never happened to me but if anyone wants to use them please read about them before!!!).
We did some tests - how to drive the power amplifier to get more power but without distorions. It seems that (at least on 14MHz) I should use no more than 1W output to drive the amp. I need to find some power meter to check what the power is in such setup (from the gauge in tuner looked like around 100W).
Finally around 23:00 I decided to leave - around 5 minutes after I had packed everything it started to rain... I went down by train..
Next 2 days my muscles didn't let me to forget about this interesting adventure...
I'm thinking about some wire antenna which should be smaller and lighter than Bud...
73!
