![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.hamradiohawaii.com\/_\/rsrc\/1307172096159\/home\/HAM_RADIO_HAWAII_Crest.jpg\")
My current assignment at Fort Leavenworth has me traveling quite a bit. My intent has been to bring a rig with me and have some casual QSOs while on the road. My success has been mixed. I would mostly attribute this to either a lack of planning on my part or being in a stuck in a hotel room with zero antenna opportunities. <\/p>\n
One of the most inspiring ham radio blogs I ever ran across was the 100 Pound Dxpedition<\/a>. I enjoyed how Scott, NE1RD<\/a>, covered his adventures of conducting portable operations… documenting what worked and what did not. His last post on that paticular blog was back in 2007, but I still use the site as a reference. Scott’s praise for the Buddipole<\/a> led me in using the Buddipole during my recent tour in Korea. Another tip from Scott I am going to try out is using a hardside golf bag case to transport my Buddipole to Hawaii. I pulled out my FT-817 and conducted an inventory:<\/p>\n \n I also splurged on two recent upgrades:<\/p>\n For PSK, rig control, and logging I have my Dell Mini<\/a> netbook. I had not used the netbook in a while, so I started it up to see how it was working. I initally purchased it back in 2009 baselined with Ubuntu and have kept Ubuntu installed on it since then. After booting it up. I updated the distribution to 10.04 LTS<\/a> and installed fldigi<\/a>. The RIGblaster easily interfaced with the netbook via a USB connection and the headphone\/microphone jacks.<\/p>\n I configured fldigi to work with the RIGblaster to include rig control using Hamlib:<\/p>\n … clicked on the Initialize button and I was good to go.<\/p>\n Setting up the macros on flidigi is pretty straightforward with the default macros only needing slight tweaking for my personal preferemces.<\/p>\n Once I fired everything up all I had to do was switch to 14.070 MHz, switch the mode to DIG, and drop the input level a bit. With the narrow yellow PSK streams cascading down the waterfall, I picked one that was calling CQ and answered. Transmit worked and my home antenna provided a nice low SWR, no need for the tuner. My macros worked and the QSO was concluded successfully. All with 5 watts.<\/p>\n I plugged in the Palm Paddle, switched to 7.115 MHz, listened and heard nothing, then used the paddles to send QRL? a few times. SWR still looked decent. After a few CQ calls, I got an answer followed by a short QSO. Great – both PSK and CW were working FB.<\/p>\n Now the question is: do I want to bring my small Tokyo Hy-Power HL-100B<\/a> amplifier that will raise the output to 100 watts? If I bring the amp, I will have to bring a power supply and a different tuner. I am thinking I need to be able to use two different configurations: <\/p>\n Now it is time to go through my Buddipole bags and figure out what I need to pack.<\/p>\n Looks like I will be there during the Hawaii QSO Party<\/a>! My current assignment at Fort Leavenworth has me traveling quite a bit. My intent has been to bring a rig with me and have some casual QSOs while on the road. My success has been mixed. I would mostly attribute this to either a lack of planning on my part or being in a stuck … Continue reading “KH6 \u2013 Hawaii Bound”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[73,75,79,91,100,109,143,144,183,207],"class_list":["post-3361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-radio","category-roadtrip","tag-dell-mini","tag-digital-modes","tag-dxpedition","tag-fldigi","tag-ft-817","tag-hawaii","tag-kx1","tag-kx3","tag-palm-paddle","tag-rigblaster-plug-play"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9vUOZ-Sd","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.n0zb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.n0zb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.n0zb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.n0zb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.n0zb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.n0zb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.n0zb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.n0zb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.n0zb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/kellyandconnie.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/02\/copy-of-cbpfull.jpg\")
Now for a rig… I think the Elecraft KX3 would be ideal for a Hawaii<\/a> trip. With 10 watts output and an internal battery, I can’t think of better rig to take to the beach. But the wait time for the KX3 is still quite a while. I have both an Elecraft KX1 and a Yaesu FT-817ND. The KX1 would be great due to its small size and ease of use. But it is limited to only CW and I would like to do some PSK in addition to CW. <\/p>\n– West Mountain Radio RIGblaster Plug n Play connects directly to the DIN socket on the back of the rig.
\n– CAT cable that connects from the RIGblaster to the rig’s ACC socket which enables rig control.
\n– PowerPole 12v adapter.
\n– Palm Paddle<\/a>.
\n– Elecraft T1<\/a> Auto-tuner.
\n– Nifty manual for the FT-817.<\/ul>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_GwDYFxb8piY\/TRO5coMhOOI\/AAAAAAAADWE\/fYEoZzku-ms\/s1600\/ft817nd.jpg\")
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\nMy FT-817 has quite a few of the optional bells and whistles from W4RT:<\/p>\n– DSP module<\/a>
\n– Kranker Knob<\/a> – probably the most useful of any of the options<\/i>
\n– One Board Filter<\/a> (300 Hz)
\n– Speech compressor<\/a> built into the MH-31 handmike
\n– Why all the options? The FT-817 was the center piece of my 2009 Field Day setup<\/a> and I was attempting to get the most I could out of the pint-sized rig.<\/ul>\n– Peg Leg tilt stand<\/a> – I think this will be helpful as one of my significant dislikes of the FT-817 is the small display which is hard to see.
\n– Magnets for the Palm Paddle – this is critically important as the Palm Paddle by itself is not heavy enough. The magnets allow the Palm Paddles to firmly stick to the top of the FT-817.<\/ul>\n– Audio: PortAudio using the netbook’s hardware soundcard for both Capture and Playback
\n– Rig: Hamlib; Device \/dev\/ttyUSB0; Baud rate 38400; Stopbits 2; PTT via Hamlib command checked<\/ul>\n(A) Beach and Buddipole<\/b>: using the barefoot FT-817, running everything on batteries.
\n(B) Lanai Portable<\/b>: used from the hotel room, with amp and assoicated power supply.<\/ul>\n
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\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.alohamovementproject.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/alohahawaii.jpg\")
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