Sometimes a summit offers little space to deploy an antenna. Either because there isn’t much room or because there are many people at the top – or both.
Then an antenna with a small footprint is required.
portable
Very lightweight SOTA microphone
I have been looking for an alternative to the rather bulky and heavy Elecraft MH3 handheld microphone for quite some time. Since I mainly operate CW, the solution could be somewhat improvised.
Inspired by an article about a very light microphone in the SOTAreflector, I started the following mini-project:
A headset from my Baofeng UV-5R was available, lying around unused. The aim was to replace its weird dual plug with a simple 3.5 mm stereo plug and change the wiring so that it could be used with the KX3. The tiny speaker I would simply trim as I’m already using earbuds for my activations.
5 to 28 MHz Random wire antenna – 12.8m (42 ft)
Some time ago I had a S2S-QSO with N1ZF. In the following e-mail contact we exchanged information and photos about the antennas used for this QSO.
This is when I became aware of the „Random Wire Antenna“ that Paul had successfully used. It consists of a 12.8 metre long wire as radiating element and an equally long ground radial. Matching is done with the KX3’s internal ATU. Since the ATU cannot match any impedance, it is important to choose a wire length that is not a multiple of half a wavelength. This way the „odd“ length of 12.8 meters emerges.
