Yet another year. Updates with NT1K

Wow! It’s been well over another year and I didn’t post any updates or projects. That’s because I haven’t done much when it comes to amateur radio. After looking back, all I’ve done was participate in the New England QSO Party (NEQP), Field Day (FD) and did a handful of contacts.

2021 was not a good year for me personally. My goal for 2022 is to do more things related to amateur radio.

Antennas Are Dead

A big reason why I haven’t made many contacts from home in 2021 is that my antennas are not working.

With my beam, I have a feeling water got into the connection where the coax from my beam (pigtail) meets the coax going to my station. Or at least I hope. You’ll see in the above graph there are dips near the band.

The tuner on my flex can’t seem to find a match for the antenna. If it does, soon as I increase the power, the SWR goes bonkers.

My other two antennas (HF9V, Inverted L for 80M) are also not working. I have a feeling water got into the line and ruined the cable.

If anyone ever decides to run their coax underground, go larger with the piping and tubing. I’m considering digging it up and replacing it with 1-1/2″ or larger tubing so I can have 3 runs of coax, control cable and even a couple CAT6 ethernet runs. Also considering just pulling the coax and run direct burial coax.

Other things going on

I’ve had a lot of major projects at home and at work. So my antenna went mostly to that. However, I always have amateur radio in mind. Only thing I really did in 2021 was the New England QSO party and Field Day. In 2022 I did basically the same thing but I also did some contests from K1TTT (contest station). I have worked on a couple projects in 2022 related to amateur radio. I’ve built a (tr)uSDX transceiver kit and I also built a networked 2X6 antenna switch. I will be releasing separate blog posts about each project.

Future Amateur Radio Goals

Since one of my major house projects is done, I can sort of focus back on my hobbies. There are many things I need to do and I even may get over my stubbornness and ask people for help.

Here is a breakdown of things I need to

• Repair or replace the CL-33 Yagi – Hardest thing to do since I don’t like going on my roof
• Run new coax to edge of property – Still hard but I won’t have to worry about falling off a roof. Plan is to run 2 lengths of cox, 2 lengths of CAT6 cable and run for 12V DC. That way I can have multiple antennas up
• Better Station Grounding – That’s going to be interesting since my shack is on the 2nd floor. Going to cover my desk with some aluminum and better cable management.
• SOTA! – Now that I have a portable radio, I want to get back into doing summits on the air. Thankfully there a group of people that like to do SOTA and hopefully get them to tag along.
• More contesting -When my station is hopefully better (before OCT), I hope to participate in CQWW and ARRL DX.

Stay tuned!