Back from CM93!

Wyatt and I have returned from CM93, a pile of logs and some great memories in tow. I'll be writing proper entries about the trip in the coming days and weeks, and processing video too, but for now, here's some pictures of the trip

KG5CCI,AC0RA, KK6FAH in Venture the morning of departure:

On approach to Santa Rosa Pier

Our Wind Shelter for the two nights on the Island

Operating from the CM93 / CM94 Line:

 Hiking up Black Mountain on Saturday:

Wyatt operating AO-73 on the Side of Black Mountain

AO-7 Pass from the top of Black Mountain (I was holding the Arrow, Wyatt was tuning)

Near Lobo Canyon Sunday Morning:

To the Entrance of Lobo Canyon:

Mouth of Lobo at the Pacific Ocean

"Painted Cave" on Santa Cruz Island on the way home 

Our welcome back to the mainland party.. 

Like I said, lots more in the upcoming weeks, but that's just a taste for now. Thanks to everyone who worked us on the trip. 73!

Missing DX.... cause YOU'RE the DX...

I make no bones about being a portable operator. I don't have a 'home' station, and my shack is just my workshop, which also doubles for other electromechanicalyardmaintencefirearmy type projects.. It's just the way it is. That said, I do chase certain things in the radio realm, grids, satellite DX, that sort of thing. It seems like though more often than not I find myself places where no one else has been, and while I get sincere pleasure out of handing out 'a new one' to people, I sure wish I could get that new one in my log some times too. Interestingly, there is a way to do this. The ARRL / FCC rules are open in this aspect, you're perfectly allowed to use YOUR transmitter, at YOUR location, even if you don't physically happen to be there, and either yourself or another licensed amateur can use YOUR callsign to work other a different station.  Legal, Legit, and just pretty damn useful for the situation I happen to find myself in. 

10 days from now, I'll be sitting on Santa Rosa Island off the coast of California, in the rare grid known as CM93. I'm there to put that grid on the air, and get as many people as I can that new one in their logs. I want CM93 in my logs too.. so how to do that? Why, better living thru technology of course.

First - The antenna. Duh. Always the most important part of any system. All I use for gain antennae are handheld Arrows.. that said, you CAN mount an arrow somewhere fixed. I don't have a rotor, so I basically have to pick a spot a certain bird will be, and hope the angle is wide enough to give a few minutes of usable pass time. A quick trip to Home Deport for a 1" diameter 6' long dowel rod, and a 45° PVC conduit elbow and we're in business.

Mounted to my existing tripod (with about 40lbs of concrete stabilizing agents) get it about 15' up in the air, hook up 2 50' runs of LMR400 I keep around, and voila - we have a gain antenna, elevated, pointed at a general TCA for a theoretical pass down the road some time.

I'm taking my more compact 857d to the Island, which means I'll be leaving my main satellite radio, the Icom 821h at home.. so I went ahead and hooked it up the antenna. Also, since I'm averse to power supplies, I setup a battery, and hooked up a trickle charger set to just cover the current draw while the radio sits on idle. In theory, it should be able to sit like this for a very long time, unless the rig transmits for 30 hours solid.. which in case I'll probably be buying a new radio... so we're gonna hope that doesn't happen. An inline diplexer for filter on the 2m side as well to round it out, and we're in business.

A few passes worth of testing basically confirms what I figured. On high birds (like FO29) If I manually point the antenna in the direction of TCA, I get about 4-5 minutes of usable pass time, without any adjustments. It's definitely not optimal, and I wouldn't build a permanent installation like this, but for my purposes, it will get the job done. Now comes the fun part. Making all this work, when I'm not there.  

Within the satellite software realm you have lots of choices, but SatPC32 is the gold standard, and does predictions, simulations, and has automatic rotor and frequency control built right in. Since manually adjusting frequencies for doppler correction is going to be nigh impossible remotely, we let SatPC32 take care of this. 1 CI-V Cat CT-17 USB cable, some fiddling around with setting on the radio, and we're in business. SatPC32 tells the radio what to set the uplink and downlink frequencies too, and adjusts them for doppler correct as it flies across the sky. Nice.

Next, the audio - I've got a Signal-link USB I use for PSK31 HF operation.. it works well, I've never used it for actual voice sound transmission and reception, but no reason it shouldn't work.. Catch was the Icom 821h uses a different accessory cable (8 Pin Din) than my 857d (6 pin mini-din) does... I looked online and was able to find the proper cable, but it was going to be close to 40 bucks and take a week to get here. This obviously wouldn't fly.. So I found a pinout diagram, dissected a piece of Cat5 cable, spliced part of it to an old 3.5mm mono audio cable I had laying around, and another part to a 1/8in mono adapter for the PTT. After a couple attempts I got everything right, and my Signal-link now controlled audio in/out and PTT on the rig. The computer controlled the Signal-link, so there I was - full computer control of the radio. 

Final piece was the software. SatPC32 would control the rig, but I still had to have some way of hearing the audio and controlling my machine over the internet. For Audio, I setup a machine specific skype account, and had it set to auto-answer, and only accept calls from my personal skype account. I had some issues with feedback and audio levels, but some tweaking managed to get it all under control. Then I used Teamviewer to actually take control of the computer that was controlling the rig, so I could manipulate the passband on linear birds, and do other functions like I was sitting at the radio. Lastly, I made up a little soundboard with some recording of my voice answering calls, and giving my grid and my report.... so It' my voice coming out of my station (without relying on skype to send the audio) no matter what. 

Finished project doesn't look too bad.. it's certainly not a shack for all time, but for this project, it'll get the job done. For testing, I went inside to my desktop computer, and took control of the laptop in the workshop.

Works like a champ. So far I've made 5 different QSO's on FO29 with it, and I'm practicing to make it better all the time. Hoping this should be sufficient to get me that rare grid, when I'm IN the rare grid. 

Special thanks to Clayton, Wyatt and Paul for all their help and encouragement in attempting this nutty endeavor. I seriously couldn't have done it without them. 

Situational Awareness

In a previous life I was around airplanes a lot. I spent 6 years going to college and flight school, and I've got couple of green plastic cards with a bunch of acronyms on them to prove it. These days however I'm known as a PWOP - a "Pilot WithOut a Plane" as the industry just didn't allow me to do the things I wanted to do life. It's fine though, I don't regret the choices I made one bit.. and a big reason is a number of the things I learned from Flight School have stuck with me in my non-aviation related fields, and have served me quite well. Probably the biggest one is the concept of Situational Awareness. 

As best I can tell, there is no one definition for what Situational Awareness is. The best explanation I can find comes from Endsley in a meeting on Human Factors in Aviation from 1988. He defined the following: 

Situational Awareness is:

• The Perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space,
• The comprehension of their meaning and,
• The projection of their status in their near future. 

To try and turn this into something more applicable to those of us using the English Language, if you posses SA, you know where relevant things are around you, you know why they are the way they are, how they got there, where they're going, and what this means to you and others. 

At this point I'm sure you're wondering WTF I'm going on about. This is a radio blog after all... well, Situational Awareness is a very applicable skill in radio. Let's take HF for example... depending on where the sun is in relative position to you on our planet, propagation to someone you want to talk to may be affected. You're likely not going to do too well trying to nab that DX contact a few thousand miles away on 10 meters when both you and him are in the dark. You would likely aim for when you both have some sort of F layer excitation occurring and the frequency you want is being reflected back down to earth via the atmosphere, ie, when the sun is shining. Recognizing this fact and acting upon it is an example of Situational Awareness, albeit one that only requires rote understanding of HF propagation mechanics, and as much time as you need to process the idea with your gray matter. 

Now consider something like a LEO Satellite pass. You will have visibility to a typical SO-50 pass for about 11-13 minutes, depending on a whole host of factors. The pass will always start generally to the north or south, and traverse across the sky towards the south or north (respect to ascending/descending passes). Now consider you want to work someone on said Satellite that is south of you. That station has their own visibility path, relative to their position on the globe as well. Your station and their station will have what is known as a 'footprint' or a 'window' to work each other, where the satellite is in view of both of your stations. If you're close together, say only a few hundred miles apart, that window will be very long, as your view of the satellite will be similar to what that other person's view is too. If your stations are far apart, say a few thousand miles, the overlap will be shorter.. sometimes MUCH shorter. Now consider something like a rare DX station, that lots of people are going to want to make contact with. Calculate up all these different windows from Station A to Station DX and some people are going to have a lot of time to make the contact, some people are going to have a short amount of time, and it's all going to be relative to their position on the globe, and their view of the bird. 

So, where am I going with all of this. If you have superior Situational Awareness skills, in your head you're probably recognizing all the elements (stations) in the environment (satellite view) within a volume of time (window) and space (locations of all of this). You are comprehending their meaning (some stations will have more time than others) and projecting their status (when is the 'best' time to call for each) in the near future (when should I call). Head asplode yet? 

Let's try this as an exercise. You have a DX station in the country of Sint Maarten. There is a descending SO50 pass that looks something like this at AOS:

Like this at TCA:

And This at LOS:

And of course, all sorts of incremental variations of the footprint across the path of the bird.  

Let's say you've got two stations that want to make contact with PJ7, one of them is in Iowa, the other is in Florida. The distance between IA and PJ7 is significant, so the window is going to be small. The station in FL on the other-hand is relatively close to PJ7 (in satellite terms) so the window is going to be nice and long. When AOS occurs in PJ7, should the Florida station immediately key up his/her mic and make contact? There's no rule or law against it, that person certainly can.. but SHOULD they? Consider the IA station now, when PJ7 goes AOS, should THEY key up there mic? Probably, but in the realm of situational awareness, you should KNOW. Maybe there's a station in Manitoba that also wants to work PJ7 as well, if there is, then IA should standby, as MB will have even less time than IA to make the contact. Every time you add in a new station, you have to add in a new element into your SA calculations. Let's consider adding Illinois, Ohio, Texas, Arkansas and North Carolina to the mix. Now consider the power and ears of each station - as some stations can obviously work to lower elevations than others, and some stations can turn up their transmit to 11 and crush everyone else. Consider a special circumstance like a newer operator not used to rapid fire Satellite QSO exchanges.. Consider that the DX station may not have the best operating environment and may not be on the Satellite right at their AOS. Consider interference from non-satellite users operating outside the band plans... and consider this, consider that, and on and on and on.. Every time there's something new to consider, it's a new element in your Situational Awareness calculations that impact your decision of when to hit that precious PTT button. 

So where does this leave us in the real world? Well, that depends. On some passes, on some birds - what I described happens. All the operators have good situational awareness, make time for other stations with small footprints, abide by the golden rule of "If you can't hear the bird, don't transmit" and generally are aware of what's happening. These passes are great, and DO happen. A few days ago I worked AO-85 from here in Arkansas, and had a 2.7° TCA elevation towards the Northeast. That's a pretty stinking low pass.. I managed to work N9IP/VO1 from a rare grid in Newfoundland on this pass, and it was a blast. What is interesting though, was that there were a bunch of stations on the pass, with a much bigger footprint than me, that held tight. They knew I was there, they knew I'm a portable operator, they knew I was hunting for Steve. They stood by, let me complete the QSO while I had a window, and then called N9IP after my window had expired, when they still had plenty of elevation. It was a beautiful thing. Everyone got the rare grid, no one was upset, everyone was polite, and most importantly - everyone had great situational awareness. Does this always happen? Hardly... most of the time everyone adopts a 'HAVE TO THROW CALL OUT RAWR RAWR RAWR' mentality, and 1 or 2 might get thru, and the rest are shut out. I understand, it happens.. but it shouldn't have too. In a later post I fully plan on discussing my own personal rules for satellite operating and how it can lead to a more enjoyable hobby, but I've written enough for now. Just remember this whole idea about Situational Awareness - it will make the radio world (and especially on Satellite) a better place. 

My Station - A Reference Post

The #1 question I get asked with regards to Ham Radio is "What kind of equipment do you use to operate on the Satellites?" - worded in about 47 different possibilities. I plan to make this post the one stop shop for my current AMSAT Station configuration, and I'll update it as needed if any life changing modifications are required.

So, how do I work Satellites? It comes to 4 things really.

1: Antenna:

I start with the Antenna because it paramount to successful operation on the birds. Yea Yea, you've heard it all before 'the antenna is the biggest part of your station' yada yada.. Well, I mean it. If your antenna system sucks, then don't even bother trying to get on the birds. Really. Seriously. Just go away. You'll end up transmitting in the blind and being deaf as a post and ruining the bird for everyone else. Whatever antenna you decide to use it needs to have some GAIN on it. I personally use two different varieties of Arrow Antennae (a small version and a big version.. more about that in a later post) for my operations and they work fantastically. You also may see me playing around 'cheap yagis' from time to time.. These are home-brewed gain antennae made out of plywood and welding rod. They also work pretty good. Any other type of gain antenna will work, but you're dealing with very weak signals, mostly < 1W, and so gain is absolutely required. Anyone who tells you it isn't, isn't a very successful operator.

2. Good Coax:

OK, so that picture isn't actually the coax I use, but it's an example of a station owned by a guy who get's it, and thus, makes the point more dramatic. Use the best coax you can afford, and is practical for your station. In that picture, 7/8th hardline works... In my station, I use 2x 8' pieces of Times LMR-240. I almost emphasize coax as much as I emphasize using the proper antenna, because there's no way you can cause more damage to your ability to hear than using cheap lossy coax. Make sure to  have the proper terminators on each end, that are high quality silver Amphenols, and make sure the coax is in good condition. Test it regularly to make sure it's as close to 0db loss as possible. I have gotten by with RG58 and RG8X in the past, but only on very short runs (like < 12") and usually only then for a novelty. When dealing with VHF/UHF frequencies, anything shy of LMR just doesn't cut it if you want to be a serious op. 

3. Rig

Now we're getting into some places where there is room for interpretation. At it's heart, you need a rig (or rigs) capable of operating on the band and mode the Satellite is transmitting and receiving on. Simple enough right? At the moment my rig of choice for Satellite operation is my Icom 821h. It is a 2M/70cm dual VFO, full duplex, all mode rig. It has some nice features like VFO lock, RIT and some other things that make it nice for bird operation, plus it will do anywhere from 2W-30W on 70cm and 5W-40W on 2m - which is more than enough to get into the birds with a strong signal to overcome QRM when needed, but not enough I have to do a RF field study when running at modest levels (Or using AO-7(B) you QRO numpties). You will also see me using my 857d on occasion, and pairing it with a random HT. Sometimes if I'm doing just the FM birds, I'll be using my FT2900 in the Jeep as one side of the equation. Sometimes you'll see me using my FunCube Dongle Pro+ to receive SDR style. There's really a lot of choices here. Some work better than others, but you can make a whole lot of things work if you try.

4. Accessories

Lots of different options here - I'll just go over a few that make my life easier. First - a headset. I use a Heil Pro Micro. When one hand is holding your antenna, and the other is trying to adjust the dial and write stuff down, having a headset is practically a necessity. Also in this picture, you'll see a battery. This is a personal preference thing, and you can read more about them in my Battery Powered blog entry, but I like the LiFePo4 battery packs for normal operation.

You'll also see in this picture a few more extras. There's Heil Audio footswitch that is used as my PTT button. See above necessity to have 4 hands to see why this is nice. I've also got a little cheap foldable table I bought at Home Depot to put everything on when I'm out in the field... It's the perfect height and perfect size. Finally I've got a big tub that all my gear goes into for easy packing. I'll almost always have pencil and paper.. sometimes I use a voice recorder, sometimes I'll have an external speaker on a tripod and a camera too.. it all just depends on what I'm trying to accomplish with that pass.

That's how I Satellite.

Chasing DX = A great view

I've been so swamped with school and work, and playing with the rapidly growing kiddo, I have let my radio pursuits slide a bit this summer. I've read on Twitter there's been some great new ops showing up on SO50, in rare grids. I've really been meaning to get out and work more of them, it just hasn't happened. Yesterday though, I resolved to chase some DX. 

Esteban, HC1JB, has shown up from time to time on SO50 recently, and he's worked some folks in the southern part of the US. It's always late in the pass, but after running the numbers I figured we should have a window. Emails exchanged, we settled on a descending SO50 pass with TCA's of around 50° for both of us. We'd have a 3 minute window as SO50 set for me, and was rising for him. He warned me though that from his QTH in Quito, Ecuador, he would be fighting mountains and volcanos for a clear view. I assured him that I could go all the way to the horizon, so I'd try and spot him as much elevation as I could. For this particular angle, I chose a hill in West Little Rock about 10 minutes from the house.. it's not as high as my 'mountain' is, but it gives me a wide angle to work with, and has a great uninterrupted horizon from about 150° to about 270°

The pass just happened to be a few minutes before sunset too, so while the bird streaked across the sky from AOS at 340° to LOS at about 160° I was treated to a great picture of the sun sinking over the distant sky. Esteban called me right on que with about 45 seconds to go, when I was down to 4° of elevation left. We quickly exchanged reports and said our 73s. The voices on the transponder all switched from English to Spanish, as US operators went LOS, and Latin American hams took over.

Satellite DXCC Entity #38, Oscar Century #95, and grid #422 in the log. Thanks my friend.. hope your view was as good as mine.

Battery Powered

I have always taken a unique approach to powering my radios, compared to the rest of the hobby. I have never *once* made a QSO with my own gear on anything that wasn't battery powered. I simply don't own any power supplies, and have never had the need or desire to get one. Now obviously I use AC power to charge my batteries, and I have tapped into the big battery on my Jeep (even going to so far as to run powerpoles to two different place in it) but the fact remains that when it's time to actually turn electricity into RF, it has always been a battery that is providing the juice to do it.

I've got several different versions, for depending on what I'm up to. For 'normal' everyday usage on HF with my 857 I've got a pair of Werker 35AH Deep Cycle lead batteries (left most in the picture). They work well, and I can use the 857 at the full 100W on one or both of these for a day's worth of contacts. Next I've got a smaller Werker Deep Cycle, rated at 12AH (furthest to the right) that I use for slightly smaller jobs. It doesn't quite have the capacity to handle a full 100W HF load (on especially something like 6m) on the 857, but at lower levels < 50W it works well. This battery is nice for quick "hamming in the park" or NPOTA application where I'll only be on the air for a few hours, and don't necessarily need full power. The SLABs (Sealed Lead Acid) are my workhorses, and do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to powering my different rigs.

Finally, I've got the sports car of the bunch - my Zippy 8.4AH LiFePo4 Battery Pack (The blue battery in the middle). This thing is stripped down with no fanciness, but weighs about 1/4 of what the SLABs do for equal power, and the Lithium chemistry will hold full voltage even under the full load of 100W 6M FM from the 857. It is what I find myself using more and more of these days, because it's just so light and powerful. When it goes dead though, you REALLY have to watch it, cause voltage will fall from 13.2V to < 12V in a matter of minutes - and when it does, the battery is dead and it's time for a recharge.  

Downside of the LiFePo4 pack, is while it's stripped down and efficient, it's made up of multiple cells that have to be kept relatively close in voltage or else bad things will happen. This requires a special charger. Luckily they're pretty cheap, and are adaptable. Here I've got it hooked up to the powerpoles in the Jeep, so it's slurping juice from the alternator and the starting battery. The LiFePo4 chemistry in addition to dumping it's juice quickly, will also accept a charge very quickly as well. My particular charger will do up to 7A of DC charging ability (while keeping the cells balanced) which means I can get the battery back up to full power from near dead in just over an hour. When on the road and navigating summit to summit, this is a huge bonus.

Since power is a consumable quantity in my trade, knowing how much you've used, and how much you have left is huge... especially on the little lithium. That's why these inline power meters are practically essential. They give you current voltage, amperage use, and how many AH you've used since you plugged in. It's a great way to watch how much juice different modes and styles of operating pull as well. I highly recommend them when you're a battery only ham like I am. 

Pinnacle Mountain - SOTA, AMSAT and Observations

I am lucky to live in a state like Arkansas. It's one of the few places in the US where cost of living is cheap, the people are great, geography is varied, and we have State Parks that rival the best in the country. One such State Park is Pinnacle Mountain, and only being 15 minutes from the house, I consider it (along with Shinall, which I can drive up) *my* mountain.

This particular Sunday, I was in a mood to go run up my mountain, and I realized that I hadn't done a SOTA activation in nearly a month. I will sometimes just grab my HT and head to the top of the peak and call out on simplex, but it seems as if it's been getting tougher all the time to find customers there.. so, with the impending CM93 trip coming up - I decided it might be time for a dry run with some gear I don't normally use for the birds. I grabbed my 857d and my FT60, 2 pieces of LMR240, my trusty LiFePo4 battery pack, adapters for everything, and my arrow. I checked to make sure there was a pass coming - and indeed SO50 would be overhead in about 2 hours. That was all I needed.. I tossed everything in my backpack, made sure my camel-back bladder was full of water, and hit the road. 15 minutes later I was in the parking lot, and on my way up to the top. 

As you can probably tell from pictures, Pinnacle is basically just a big hill rising straight up out of the Arkansas River Valley. There's very little approach, you just get on the trail, and start climbing. I made pretty good time getting to the top, especially considering I was hauling 30 pounds of radio gear, first aid, and water with me. I'll have to do at least one hike roughly double the elevation of this out on Santa Rosa with a similar amount of gear.. and we've allowed 2 hours for that hike, so I think I'm on pace to where I should be.  

Once I got on top I went out to the 'West Summit' which is just a few foot lower than the 'East Summit' but a bit more isolated by 50 yards or so of scrambling over some boulders. It's also a bit further away from the trees, and has a better 360° view of the horizon, which is always important for Satellites. I set my gear up and called CQ on 146.520 for a bit, hoping to find some local folks before the pass at 2016UTC. To my surprise, I had quite a few takers. A little bit of power and a 3 element beam makes things much much better than a 5W HT and a whip. 

After I made a bunch of simplex contacts, I got setup for SO50. I would transmit with 10W on the 857 and receive on my FT60. I'd used this combination before, but it had a while. This is where I ran into some issues.

First - you have to set a 67hz PL tone to get into SO50's transponder. This is no biggie on an 857, you go into the menu, scroll down with the coarse adjustment knob til you find the PL tone setting, then use the big knob to select the PL tone setting.. save this, go back to the VFO, and then enable the tone on the frequency. Everything went fine until I tried to scroll with the big knob... no such luck.. I could scroll UP - but whenever I'd spin the wheel counter-clockwise.. nothing happened. This seemed to be happening on all menus and all bands. The more coarse step knob worked to scroll down, but the big dial simply wasn't responding. Well this sucks.. especially since this is the ONLY way to get the proper PL tone assigned, and unfortunately the menu doesn't start over at the bottom when you go to the top. I had run into this before, when my 857 is sitting in the sun, and it gets hot - and for some crazy reason the big knob doesn't scroll down anymore... No idea why, just does. It usually calms down in a few minutes after getting it back in the shade, but here I was at AOS for a pass lasting 12 minutes, on a frigging mountain with no shade. I covered the rig with my backpack to get it cooling off and went to improvising.

I quickly reconfigured... I'll use my FT60 to TX and my 857 to receive.. 5W uplink on a sunday afternoon is not optimal on SO50, but I'll give it a shot. I was able to work W5PFG/P in DM66 quickly - but after that I couldn't get in. To further complicate matters since I was now receiving with the 857, I had to adjust doppler there by, you guessed it, dialing DOWN - which I couldn't do. No problem, I can use the coarse control for this. Oh but wait, there's more! By default the 857 does 25khz steps on the coarse dial on 70cm, you have to change it to 5khz step in the menu by <drumroll> scrolling down with the big knob. If there is any problem with the 857's design, it's the extremely menu based options that requires every single setting to be controlled from there as a dial option. When something happens to your dial, you're basically hosed.

Around TCA of SO50 I got the 857 cool enough in the shade, that the down dial finally started responding, so I reconfigured back to my initial setup - TX on 857, RX on FT60. I got PL tone set, got TX freq set, and now I should be in business. However, this is where I ran into issue 2.

When I keyed up on the 857 I noticed I wasn't hearing myself (or ANYTHING) on the downlink. Once again, something wasn't right.. One of the more interesting phenomenon Satellite operators experience, that isn't that common the other parts of ham radio, is the concept of 'de-sense'. Since we're almost always cross-banded, you have to keep all of your TX power out of the front-end of your RX box. When you don't, it wipes out what you're receiving, and you lose your ability to be full duplex. This was now happening to me. Keep in mind that I normally am working Satellites with my Icom 821. It's a great rig, dual independent VFOs, extremely sensitive and good power levels. It also seems to be extremely resistant to desensing. I can't really explain why - perhaps the two independent VFOs are shielded a bit better, who knows, but with the 857 and ft60 combo though, some serious desense was happening.

In the past when I've had issues with desense, it's typically because something is not tuned right. The arrow is a nice hardy antenna that has a well built gamma matching device and I've always tuned all of my antennae as best as I can out of the box. I hadn't checked the tuning on my arrow in a while though, but it's been working well, so I haven't bothered.. well, until now. One of the other differences between my 821 and my 857, is that the 857 has a built in SWR meter, while my 821 doesn't. So even if it was getting out of tune, I was using a rig that is resistant to desense, and I'd have no built in methods for checking - unless I felt like putting a meter in line. So, at this point I keyed up, glanced at the SWR meter on the face of the 857, and saw it about halfway up - indicating an SWR in the range of 3:1. That's no bueno.

Lacking the time (and a Phillips screwdriver) to do anything about it, I just decided to finish the pass as is, and transmitted in the blind when I thought I had an opening. Half-Duplex is not how I like to operate, but it will get the job done. I managed 3 more contacts in the last 10 degrees of the pass, and had enough to call the activation complete. Phew.

I grabbed some video before packing my stuff up:

And headed back down the peak. I had come dangerously to borking the activation, but got it done. I was glad, but I had to some work to do in the shack later on. That said, still a great afternoon on my mountain.