https://t.co/xA7PsSGpM8

My 5 band, 4 element quad finally fully up

My portable equipment. mcHF tranceiver and JPC-12 antenna

Say again that HAM radio is for the rich ... 70$ tranceiver, 30$ key and 40$ EFHW antenna. With 4W from Kenya heard all over Europe and even 12000km WZ7I. One CQ call and already in a pile up .... CW is king ...

My Power Amplifier is complete and working. Did not yet find the courage to go to the limits. The DC supply stands on the floor. All info about the amplifier status is on an external display on top of the tranceivers.

Now as the quad antenna is soon ready .... here the other 10dB gain. Almost ready to switch on .... and hopefully not roasting too many transistors until its stable. The cooling system is a bit unconventional 😂😂 ... I had to use what is available on Aliexpress.

I learned CW mainly in the army and therefore used to write all down. Tiresome, I learn head-copy now. Single words no problem, even at 35, but can't keep several words in my head. I therefore made this small app to slowly increase the number of words.

A customer peeped in my shack. ... "What is this here?" ... "From here I control all the nuclear launches" ... "ooh, wow .... we have that in Kenya?" ... I hope I do not get deported.

After a long period of rain, finally a sunny day and half of the antena is up.

Modifying my analog and manual rotator controller so that it can connect to the log4om logging software.

One element of the quad is up. 4 more to go. After several failed trials for the spreaders I finally use two parallel PVC pipes, wrapped with cotton gauze, soaked in epoxy, then painted. Now strong enough and will survive the Mombasa sun for a while.

The tower is at his final place and cranked up

https://t.co/twKSLBk0pu

https://t.co/h8kjqu8SLv

My homemade tower is almost finished. It will reach a height of 20m. All works are done by my welding trainees who started their course just 2 month ago. Next will be the antenna. A 4 element 5 band quad. A real monster, occupying 9x9x9m space

https://t.co/szWOWbGifb

Retro style is fun

Done with the concept work. I decided to mount the yagis on my landrover so I can drive to the beach and take advantage of good ground gain. The antennas are in aluminium the rest is PVC piping.

100W transmitting is about -10dB on the receiving side. (S9+60dB). This is strong but not a thread to the receiver. I made a switch-over, with an ordinary power switch, which allows me to swap the antennas between tranceiver and sdr.

This confirms the sharp lobes in the chaotic radiation pattern on the higher bands. When I tramsmit on one antenna, I can use the other as receiving g antenna for my SDR receivers. Surprisingly the two antennas are well decoupled despite the shared counterpoise. >> next post