Backpacking and Ham Radio in the Deam?

[Digital_photog]

Anyone up for a winter ham trip to Deam?

https://www.indianagunowners.com/fo...am_radio_polar_bear_portable.html#post1571029

 

[PistolBob]

When out camping or hiking I have had great success on HF with simple end fed half wave wires and a little home brew matcher. Good QRP to be had.

Worked both coasts from the Bedford hamfest a couple years ago with a bumper mounted hamstick on 40m and my KX1 at about 2 watts.

 

[Digital_photog]

When out camping or hiking I have had great success on HF with simple end fed half wave wires and a little home brew matcher. Good QRP to be had.

Worked both coasts from the Bedford hamfest a couple years ago with a bumper mounted hamstick on 40m and my KX1 at about 2 watts.

Today I was using my HFpack antenna. on the tripod instead of the pack.
One of the 4 QSOs was with another HFpacker working QRP portable in Washington. I wasn't unhappy with a 2 way QRP portable contact. The others were all running higher power.

 

[Smitty506th]

I think a Ham backpacking weekend should be set up for all 4 seasons and that way if you cant go to one you can wait a few months and get out with the group next time. It would be a great way for new hams to get into it while also passing along knowledge to others.

What says the group?

 

[Digital_photog]

I think a Ham backpacking weekend should be set up for all 4 seasons and that way if you cant go to one you can wait a few months and get out with the group next time. It would be a great way for new hams to get into it while also passing along knowledge to others.

What says the group?

This isn't a bad idea. I'm too far away to travel there too often but others could do it. The only question I have is Do we have enough hams who winter camp to do it? I was out Sunday afternoon. It was cold after several hours of setup and operation. I know that the Deam Wilderness is enough further south that the weather often is milder than here in far northern IN. If you are also a member of ar15.com you may want to post about it on the ham forum there. There are members who are on both forums but we have a very active group of Indiana hams there.

Now some comments about Sunday. Not too successful. Bands were very packed. Had high power stations setting on the HFpack calling frequencies on 75, 40 and 20. 15 meters was open but not many were working there. Some other portable ops were running the 17 meter HFpack frequency.

Now a couple pictures of our setup at Bonneyville Mill County Park

Notice that Elkhart County built us a tower for our antennas. We have used this site for field day several times in the past.

 

[Hawkeye]

wow is this in english ????? LOL

No. Its in Hamish. That is a modern variant of the ancient Elvish.

 

[indyjoe]

I've just run across an antenna for working satellites with 2m and 70cm, that might be handy for 2m contact a distance away from the repeaters:

http://theleggios.net/wb2hol/projects/rdf/tape_bm.htm

People have talked about how they are building more of them, because they have used them setup statically to get far repeaters that they normally wouldn't. No reason you couldn't make it break down in the middle, then with the tapes rolled up, you have a very portable yagi for really reaching out there.

 

[westfork]

i built a tape antenna like that for 2m shortly after i got my license as my first antenna building project. it worked great and i got good swr out of it on the first try. fun to make and very portable.

 

[shibumiseeker]

No. Its in Hamish. That is a modern variant of the ancient Elvish.

Practiced by artios everywhere!

 

[Sailor]

I have heavy tripods. need them for some of my large cameras. That antenna was part my construction and part purchased from a friend. he designed that coil. I have several single band coils that I made. he sells some of those coils and antennas on ebay. That coil wouldn't be hard to copy but at the price he sells them I couldn't mess around with it. with 2 of them you can make an antenna similar to the buddipole.

Link to your friends ebay sales?