Inspired by a paper from HB9BCB I built my own version of a small and lightweight coupler for an EFHW dipole. It helps reducing the weight of my radio equipment for long hikes to alpine summits (see here).
portable
Shortened vertical for the 30 metre band
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.
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 an 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“ Paul had successfully used.
dl3tu 