Back To It

I can’t believe it’s been 4 months since I wrote the last post.  Most of it has to do with that old “out of sight, out of mind” thing.  I started this on Blogger and it’s not somewhere I go often.  I have now migrated this series to WordPress on my personal site.  I like that better because I know I have a copy of my writing and more control over its utilization.  Rather than get into a huge technical Thing, I just made this a special category of my reading blog (so long neglected its embarrassing).  The working theory is that having an integrated blog, I can write on a number of topics and sort them easily, depending on my mood. 

So, I will pick up the narrative from where I left off, but in somewhat less excruciating detail at least until I get more current.

So to finish up the June narrative, I started putting together a home station (a “shack” in the vernacular).  The plan was an HF radio and a multi-band antenna.  Low drag, not too expensive or unsightly as the wife was still not sure about all this.

After a suitable amount of research I settled on a Yaesu FT-840 transceiver.  It’s an older model, but not out of date and does 160m to 10m at 100W.  The reviews on eHam were pretty positive and it’s clear that with proper care, it’s a fine starter rig.  So I snagged on off of eBay used out of IL, I think.  Ran about $386 shipped.  It came pretty quick and was double boxed and had no suffered any ill effects from it’s travel.

OK, back to that, well, it seems you only need a couple items, but…you also need a 12V power supply, and coax to connect you to the antenna.  And an antenna tuner since a multiband antenna may not be resonant where you want it. That means you need a coax jumper by the way.  Also, you need to have a way to get the said coax out of the house to the antenna.  MFJ makes these nice patch panels that slips into the window. You connect the feedline to the inside port and the run to the antenna to the outside port.  Quite handy and it allows you to try out amateur radio without drilling large holes in your walls.  Oh, and that means another little piece of patch coax to go from the tuner to the panel. 

You also need to ground your shack.  That means an 8′ copper grounding rod pounded into the dirt outside your window.  BUT, that ground may not be at the same ground potential as your AC ground.  Bad news.  The difference runs through you when you touch a (mains grounded) chassis and the radio at the same time.  Also if there is a wiring fault in the house, that will be line voltage.

So…you have to run a heavy copper wire from that ground rod to the ground rod at your service entrance (in my case, the other side of the house) and we are talking roughly a $1/foot these days.  There are areas to skimp, and hams are notorious for skimping, this isn’t the place.  Get the real grounding rod, not the crap MFJ sells, go to Lowes/Home Depot and get not less than 6 gauge wire.  It doesn’t have to be buried to perform it’s function, but the exposed wire could potentially be carrying hefty current (see above).  I had to run mine around the front of the house, so I “buried” it under the brick garden border, quick, easy and safe.

Oh, and on safety, that antenna?  The big LIGHTNING ROD?  Yeah, that one.  You need to put a lightning arrestor connector on the outside of the window panel where the feedline goes in and run the ground wire down to your ground (which should be right there).  Let’s not fool ourselves, that’s not going to protect you in the case of a direct hit.  But, it will work for near misses.  Remember, the surface of the Earth is large and your antenna is small, but near misses will still induce big current.  Also, when the insurance company’s fire investigator is poking through the wreckage of your house after that direct hit, you can point to that device as doing your do diligence and it will keep them from weaseling out of paying your claim.

OK, let’s recap my “basic” starter HF station:

You could skip the patch panel (and one coax patch cable) and probably the tuner as well and save about $100, since I got the tuner used on eBay.  You’d be hard pressed to find a multi-band antenna that’s worth owning for less and the GAP.  You could buy/build a dipole for say, 40 meters (and get 15m for free it’s an odd harmonic), and one for 20 meters, though, if you aren’t too worried about efficiency, the 40m dipole will likely be just fine on 20m too.  That would save you about $300, but presupposes you have a way to hand the dipoles and the wherewithal to do it. Suppose you do and you’re feeling lucky and skip the lightning protector too, you are down to $639.

If you have your shack on the same side of the house as the service entrance and you place the antenna closer to the house, you could shave another $50-$75 off that figure.

So, that gives you an idea where the hobby starts cost-wise and an example of a full working setup.  With the GAP I can in fact “work the world”, if they have a 1.5kw linear a 90′ tower.  It’s not that bad, if the bad is open I can do pretty well. So far I haven’t worked anyone in the Far East, but I have the SE Pacific, Africa, European Russia.  It’s a good starter antenna as it also does all the bands of interest though it’s not very efficient on 80m (5-10%) and not usable on 160m.

My long term plan is that this is my “reference” antenna as I build out the others I plan to have.  Since this is essentially unity gain, any other single band antenna should be noticeably better in gain and noise, especially on the lower bands.