K3LFO/W3DIO Rover Site

Our run frequency on 2 meters will be 144.245. If you call us and don’t hear us try back in a few minutes as we will be returning back to this frequency often in between searching and pouncing. We will be running 50 through 3456.

DISCLAIMER: All times are relative and subject to change due to band conditions!

Saturday

FM27BX (Crisfield, MD shore) – Start of contest Approximately 1.5 hours

*Travel Time 2.0 hours

FM28AW (Army Reserve Center) – Approximately 2 hours

*Travel Time 15 minutes

FM29AA (Community Center) – Approximately 1.5 hours

*Travel Time 30 minutes

FM18UX (Near Bay Bridge Airport) – Approximately 1.0 hours

*Travel Time 2.0 hours

FM19JJ (W3DIO’s Home QTH Driveway)

*** FM19JJ depends on whether I get some tree’s trimmed before the contest

UPDATE: Tree’s have been trimmed. The RV will make it up my driveway now!!!

Would like to make some digital mode contacts at night. Who needs sleep anyhow?

I believe these are the standard operating frequencies for WSJT and PSK31 on 6 and 2. Look for us there and we can work up the bands as far as conditions will permit. Probably getting in around 1am EDT.

50.260  JT65
50.262  FSK441
50.290  PSK31
144.140 JT65
144.142 FSK441
144.144 PSK31

Sunday

FM19KJ or FM19jj depending (Mount Airy, MD) – Approximately 2.0 hours

*Travel Time 1.25 hours

FM09UR (Sidling Hill) – Approximately 2.5 hours

*Travel Time 3.0 hours

FM08US (Skyline Drive – Hogback) – End of Contest

Note: More details and updates to this may be forthcoming…

We unfortunately had to cancel our trip to Dayton. Probably a good thing. Will have saved a ton of money in gas with the RV @ 6 MPG and even more money on purchases 😉

Today, I worked on a few things.  First and foremost, I opened up the 222 transverter and discovered that the only way to get down to 2 watts out of the transverter was to drop the IF power down to 5 watts (lowest the TS-2000 will go on 28 Mhz.).  Once i had that set and tested it, the overdrive/swr fault protection did not kick in.  It looks like that cured our problems we were experiencing on 222.  Before, with our typical 10 watts IF drive, we were getting over 5 watts out which was overdriving the Mirage amp.  This is probably because when I set the drive level originally, I was running at 13.8v and our equipment is all set at 14.2v.

With that complete, I moved on to the next task in the garage.  I cut some aluminum angle-bar to make two little 90 degree brackets.  I’m using these on the 2 meter amp so that I can attach the large size 0 wire and connectors horizontally as there is not enough room between the shelves to do it vertically as you normally would.  Did a really good job with that.. I didn’t take a picture though. I’ll have to do that.  Once I test this, I may just make some more of these for the other TE Systems amps.

Dad(Jim) has been working on a PTT relay box.  We recently discovered (by reading the manual) that the ptt lines out of the TS-2000x are rated at 20ma  max and that the down east microwave transverter ptt relays are rated at 25ma.  We have been very lucky we have not blown the IC that controls all those PTT lines.  So we will be installing a PTT interface that will isolate the ptt lines and allow us to connect them to devices that can draw up to 3amps.  We dont have anything that draws that much current but it’s always best to over engineer these things.  He also working on building a relay box that will be used in conjunction with an Ameritron remote coax switch to switch between the various microwave IF’s and PTT lines.  This will make it really cool and easy to switch between bands on 2304 through 10G.  The nice thing will be that we will eventually have this wired up so the 5th posiion on switch is straight through 2 meters going to a 160 watt amp which will connect to the 2 meter square loop at the front of the RV.  Our goal is to have the second ts2000x handle all bands from 903 and above for microwaves and be secondary on 6 through 432.  We will eventually add a second 222 transverter to the RV for this purposes.

We spent some time today figuring out how we were going to integrate 3.4ghz into the RV.  We decided a few things:

1. We are going to purchase a DEM 2304 transverter and a 2.3 ghz 60 watt board from pyrojoseph so we can create a much smaller package than we have now for 2304.  Once we have this new package put together we will take the old one and remount it in a nice chasis and set it up for use at either my house or as standby equipment for that band.  You can never have enough redundancy.
2. We are going to stack the 2.3 and 3.4 ghz transverters and place the amps for both bands in such a way so they both fit on the same shelf with the transverters.

Our plans for June are just to get on the air with 1 watt for 3.4ghz.   The amp will be integrated hopefully before September.