Ham Radio - 630 meter magloop observations and first contact 

John Smith 00

I saw the video. The one with your KX2 where you worked the SOTA station. Set that big beast up as a magnetic loop with a 1/5 diameter coupling loop and it will probably get out a lot better. They're surprising antennas.

Thanks Larry, Sure, as long as you provide a link to the source, I'm fine with it.

If you haven't watched my 3D printing vids, give them a look. Also, the Anet's are the printers that have made the news recently for catching fire. In those cases, the builders hadn't properly secured the heater and wires on the hot end, allowing the heater to pop out and fall against the acrylic frame. So make sure things are secure and wires are cleanly routed. Wires that flex, like the bed heater wires, should be arranged to allow for free movement and no pinched areas of extreme flexing. They can break if they're being bent too much over too small of a length. If you've never done 3d design or slicing for printing, watch my two introductory videos on those subjects. TinkerCAD is simple, but also very easy to learn and can get you making your own parts with the least frustration. You can graduate to more powerful design tools later. Improper bed leveling is the biggest cause of print fails and frustrations. Ideally, you want the nozzles gap to be about half it's diameter across the entire bed. So, 0.4mm nozzle, 0.2mm gap when Z is at zero. About the thickness of a sheet of paper. Hope that helps.

Noisy sine wave generator

If you're on 474.2 USB, that should work. You'll probably hear a JT9 signal around 1kHz in the waterfall, up to about 1.5 where WSPR signals should be. I'll be around 600-800Hz. I may finish the bucket variometer tomorrow and be TXing on the end fed wire by Friday night if it works. Probably a better chance then. (if it works)

Have it set to 474.2 KHz. I'll be listening tonight. 73 WB3BJU

Donald D'Egidio I have an FT450D. While in CW, push the mode button and hold it for about 1 second and it will change to the other sideband on CW. I like to use LSB CW simply because when you tune the knob clockwise, the tone goes up, and counter clockwise the tone goes down. -K7DR

Wow! That worked. Don't know how I missed that in the manual. Thanks. 73 WB3BJU

Hi Kevin, Just did the hold mode button trick and it did switch to LSB on CW. The freq display changed to 476.92, so I probably was off your freq all these nights. Will listen again tonight. 73 WB3BJU

I've tried three forms of coupling so far, but not the ferrite. I do know that efficiency in these loops is related to Q. The higher the efficiency, the narrower the bandwidth tends to be. So the tradeoff might be slightly poorer performance.

You'd need a huge amount of ferrite. Ferrite concentrates the magnetic field through the center of a coil (as in an AM radio). You'd have a lot of ferrite and not much concentration of the magnetic field to show for it.

Tuesday I release the video on loading my end fed wire with a bucket variometer along with instructions on building the vario.

I built my own 630 meter CW transmitter. Search my channel for 630 to find the series of videos on it's design and build.

Even a shortened trapped dipole would need to be at least a quarter wave in length, around 500 feet. Plus the traps would have to bbe monstrously huge. Not practical.

Well that is how I learn! THANK YOU! I had not set down and did the math. It would work if you lived on a farm or ranch with lots of room.

That's an excellent idea! I don't know why I didn't think of it. I might try that this afternoon and see how well it works. Could improve my radiated power just a little bit too.

I've yet to find any signals on 630, had 4 European SDRs up at grayline and shortly after. May try again. Wait I misspoke, I did see some WSPR, but CW is what I seek.

Yes. woodwinds in general. Well, I used to anyway. A recent accident split my lip up to my nostril. They sewed it back up but my embouchure is totally screwed now.

@@loughkb Funny they call flutes always as 'woodwinds', even if the instrument is made of metal! ;-)

@@PaulaBean Metal flutes are fairly modern. Go back to the Baroque era and they were made out of wood. Like Irish flutes.

The transmitter is my home brew arduino controlled CW TX. I'm using my yaesu FT817 and sometimes Kenwood TS 440sat for RX. I did a write up on the transmitter and four videos. Here: kb9rlw.blogspot.com/2018/06/a-simple-arduino-controlled-630-meter.html