What a nice combination, worked field day today and had a blast. I went to a little-known park, Sage Ranch, just NorthWest of the San Fernando Valley (about 20 minutes from my house and NE of Los Angeles), that has an elevation of 2,000 feet. My 11 year-old daughter came along and made several contacts. The performance, particularly receive quality was just excellent, even though we just used the internal speaker.
Instead of using the included coax for the Buddipole, I soldered some mini banana plugs (Calrad 90-809) to ladder-line and made the connection stiff and secure with shrink tubing. The ladder-line was connected to an LDG 4:1 balun. After some trial and error setting the coil tap, I was able to easily tune 1:1 swr on all bands with a very broad bandwidth. I was able to tune up well with the supplied coax, but I was concerned about the losses. I was able to band-jump as if I was at home. Because the Buddipole is on a metal mast, I ran the ladder-line down the guy rope (I'm using the 18 foot mast) to the balun, attached to the guy with plastic ties, to keep it away from the mast. The entire station took about 1/2 hour to set up, it was just great. Power came from a 74 Ah gell cell. Not only very portable, but very excellent equipment. Tom W6EIJ _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
