The QRPer Board

FT-817nd, with the usual complement of field gear: LDG Z-817 tuner (kinda goes with it), whatever wire antenna I'm trying out at the time, Portable Zero rails, SOTAbeams speech compressor, 4.5 AH Bioenno batt, signalink and a recycled linux laptop, and (the BIG ONE) a rite-in-rain notepad. Yeah, bor...

Very practical, and a nice combo of kit and DIY. Thanks for posting.

Hi Andrew, Well, that antenna farm went with the sale of my old house last year, so that avenue of experimentation is a closed chapter, and now I'm a downtown apartment dweller. However... fall is just 3 months off, and I'll be ready to go camping in the N FL woods with a spool of wire, SWR meter, a...

Thanks Brian, it's always good to have real-world reports. Personally, I'm itching to get back into the woods here in N FL, but realistically that's not happening until mid-October. In the meantime, I need to draw up an experiment plan and get the gear ready. As you said, it is awfully handy to have...

Brian, I'm 100% onboard with EFHW as a solution, because in most essential ways they're he same as a dipole, and often a lot more convenient to deploy. Do you have any comparisons with random wires? I'm guessing more noise & less gain with the random wire, but have no data on this. I will say, m...

Reading around, it sounds like a lot of SOTA folks, either use verticals (and I can understand that, due to low takeoff angle) or EFHW, and in the second case, folks often complain about "not being able to get on air on band X due to the antenna..."; now... why such a "refusal" ...

My favorite field design is this hybrid W3EDP-Zepp, ah, thing. It does require a 4:1 unun as well as a tuner to tame it, but it is definitely frequency agile. The original designs are here: https://thewakesileave.wordpress.com/2016/09/27/the-mini-14th-w3edp-a-special-design-for-a-balcony-down-south/...