HAWKSBILL MOUNTAIN 2011 REPORT 26 July 2011 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PRIMARY PARTICIPANTS: John Huggins, KX4O Eric Nystrom, W4EON Dr. Jay Gundlach, not a ham Rob Searle, not a ham This above team of four hauled the gear to the peak, set things up and operated. ˙This is the same team as last year's White Rock Cliff. ADDITIONAL THANKS TO THE FOLLOWING: Chris, KK4AWJ - Loaned the Yaesu VX-8DR APRS HT Mark Lindsey, KD6AKC - 445 comms & creation of the HWKSBL-6 packet log Randy (W4IFI), Steve (K3KQ), Rich (K1HTV) - Moral support/some testing Chuck (N4YXW) - Helped me understand the APRS I-Gate situation THOUGHTS: After a short hike up between 460 and 600 feet (Eric and I are still working the numbers), we had things set up well before noon. As soon as I turned the radio on and loaded up the ATGP configuration I saw ACKs of my beacons from MDMTNS-7. ˙Not long thereafter, AOMTN-5 also ACKed my beacons. ˙Almost immediately I started seeing packets coming from the south. ˙Initially from CLNGMN-2 then later from SPRNGR-1. The only hickup I had was the initial setting of the callsign in the radio APRS configuration as I wasn't sure what Hawksbill would be called when I set things up over a week ago. ˙That was fixed quickly after I stepped through each setting to confirm things during initial checkout. The southern chain was established pretty quickly. GDHill came online not long after that and that's how things were for quite a while. Finally later on packets started coming in from the north and the log files can tell that story better than I can. ----- SIGNAL STRENGTHS ON VHF: S9+ to both MDMTNS-7 and AOMTN-5. ˙The signals were not bone crushing strong, but certainly rock solid. ˙No worries. ---- SIGNAL STRENGTHS ON UHF: This was the first year I brought a UHF antenna. ˙Signal strength from AOMTN was S2 or so; No problems. ˙Dave, at AOMTN, did one experiment when we first made contact which dropped the signal almost to the noise before he switched it back. ˙I am interested to know if he used the super tall vertical for 440 too. Signal from K3KQ's residence was S3 or so and he was using an HT. ˙ Pretty decent connection there. Signal from W4IFI was S1 or so. ˙Perfectly functional, but noisy. ˙ I could hear him better than he could hear me. Signal from KD6AKC was S1, noisy, but almost always good enough. ˙ I could hear him better than he could hear me. ˙Many times he could not hear me at all. ˙He used a Discone antenna in his attic I think. Signal from K1HTV was booming in at S7 or so from his QTH. ˙He has the same antenna used at AOMTN-5. ˙Being in Amissville rather than Fauquier County, his QTH is quite a bit closer to the peak than the other folks. ----- ANTENNAS: 2m - Again I used the collinear Super J-Pole fabricated to be hiked in. ˙It only does one thing... and it does it well.˙ It just works. 70cm - New this year was a custom built Double J-Pole for 445. ˙The 70cm band is so wide that no one antenna I know of provides complete coverage. ˙Rather than "hope" to purchase one tuned for 445.925, I just designed and built one out of one continuous piece of hardened 12 AWG wire and fed it with a halfwave balun. ˙The coax is RG316 and adds 1 dB loss to the budget. ˙The antenna wound up tuning higher than I wanted. ˙Taping it to an electric fence fiberglass pole dielectrically loaded it down to near 446 - close enough. ˙This also gave the antenna more of a mechanical backbone. ˙This antenna tests at about 4 dBi gain or so.˙ Unsatisfied, I will try something more inventive next year. New this year is a 2m/440 band splitter made by Larson. ˙It is very old and I don't think you can find this particular model any more. ˙ It works fine, has the tragic PL-259 connectors on it and adds 1/2 dB loss to both the high and low ports. Knowing my 2m margins were robust, I didn't optimize cable lengths to the shortest possible. ˙This made no difference for the APRS packets. ˙ UHF comms are close enough to the edge to warrant rethinking this. ˙ Of course, just getting the UHF antenna a couple feet higher would likely improve things a whole lot. ˙Next year... ------ THE TM-D&10 RADIO: This is easy to overlook, but imagine trying to do this event without APRS specific radios. ˙Imagine the clutter of all the cabling. ˙ Imagine twiddling and tweaking of this and that audio levels. ˙I am quite thankful of a well integrated D710 radio.˙ Mine is stock plus the little GPS-710 unit stuck to the back. ----- THE BIG WOOD BOX: As you can see in the photographs the radio is housed in a shakily built wood box that just barely fits into the backpack.˙ I commissioned my son to build a radio platform to bolt the radio to.˙ What I got was that plus the full enclosure.˙ Bonus?˙ Even though there are plenty of newbie woodworking mistakes, it did fulfill my requirements precisely.˙ The radio enjoyed cool, out of the sun, operation the whole time.˙ It rained initially and it was kept dry.˙ I have decided to overlook the sloppy construction and pay him the whole commission. (he owes me an insurance payment for his car anyway so I will get the $ back). ----- THE YAESU HT: This is a cool little radio.˙ I used it to contact some Fauquier folks on the Warrenton repeater.˙ Chris set it up as HWKSBL on the APRS side.˙ I don't know what it was doing with APRS.˙ One thing about being this high is I don't think an APRS radio ever gets a chance to transmit if it is waiting for dead air - APRS signals were almost like a constant noise.˙ Still I thought about trying the CQ Server thing, but one look at all the triple function buttons kept that hope only a dream for this year.˙ Nice radio though and it did help out this year with the repeater contacts. PHOTOS in the 2011 HWKSBL-6 album here... http://groups.yahoo.com/group/at-golden-packet/photos/album/0/list LOG FILE (from KD6AKC) in the 2011 Attempt Log Files directory here http://groups.yahoo.com/group/at-golden-packet/files/ Thanks for a great Sunday everyone. John (and Eric)