Fixing an old HT

A couple of months ago I was asked to fix a 20 year old HT-202 from radioshack. I had to look up the error code on the internet, and I found out that the CMOS battery had failed. The CMOS battery that maintains the memory and settings during the periods when the radio is turned off. It should be nited there is a similar battery on the motherboards of computers for the same reason. This is not an end of life for the radio problem. I opened up the radio identify the location of the battery and what was required. The CMOS battery is a CR2303, but is in the solder tab format.

This meant I was going to have to cut the leads from the old battery and then solder them on to the new battery. One of the difficulties is that the battery was stuck to the back of another board by an adhesive sticker. Once I soldered the connections back on to the new battery, I used double sided tape to mechanically attach the battery where the adhesive had been. A detailed look at the repair is shown below.

 Once the radio was reassembled it turned on set to default settings without a problem. Now the radio can last maybe another 20 years before we have to replace the battery again.

NY QSO Party

State QSO parties are great opportunities for ham radio operators to get on the air and make plenty of contacts that can vary from light ragchewing to serious contesting contacts. One of the advantages of a state QSO party is that in general the exchange part of a contact is the County rather than some other complicated set of letters and/or numbers.
The New York QSO Party was held last Saturday October 18th from 10AM to 10PM. I had intended to get on right around the start and operate thru most of the day as I had plans in the evening. Unfortunately I had to run errands that delayed my start until noon. Once I had setup my computer I went about looking for stations that were participating. I was able to work plenty of stations, but I also heard more stations than I worked. I learned that because I live in a populous county I should have spent most of my time holding a frequency and calling CQ rather than spending all my time hunting for stations. You can see below my score summary:

 Band   Mode  QSOs     Pts  Mul   Mt2
         3.5  LSB      1       1    0    0
           7  LSB     28      27   22    2
           7  USB      4       3    2    0
          14  LSB      1       0    0    0
          21  USB      1       1    0    0
          28  USB      1       1    0    0
          50  USB      1       1    0    0
         144  USB      1       1    0    0
         420  USB      3       3    2    0
       Total  Both    41      38   26    2


            Score : 1,064

VHF J-Pole Installation

Last month I finished installing a dual band J-Pole antenna based on the design of W4ULD published in the October 2000 QST. This antenna was built for my father Scott, KC2RFU.  The most difficult part was procuring the small diameter copper pipe. The mounting bracket we built used a muffler clamp and half rounds held the antenna. In the picture below KC2RFU is working on the mounting bracket.

It took some concerted effort to to install the antenna near the high point of the roof. Since the installation took longer than expected we had to deal with weather that was much cooler and grimmer on the second day.

KC2RFU next to the antenna at his QTH

After any antenna is installed the first thing you want to do is test it. It seemed to be working just fine after doing some basic smoke tests. I then installed an SWR/powermeter to test the antenna. We got approximately a 1.5:1 SWR on 2m. We then tuned in a local 2m repeater and keyed up with success. What followed was a good 30 minute long QSO on both 2m and 440 simplex.

Field Day

I know it has been about 3 weeks since field day, but I am finally getting around to writing about it. I had planned to participate in Field Day locally with the Larkfield Amateur Radio Club, W2LRC. Unfortunately they canceled the plans and I had to make alternate plans. My friend Brandon, KB3IGC, had informed me that he planned to run field day from the RPI campus. The original plan was to use a wide open athletic field. Unfortunately a pop up thunderstorm forced us to retreat to a dry building. After the thunderstorm we opted to set up near the RPI amateur radio club building in order to quickly get into a dry place in case of rain. We setup a homebrew vertical multiband and a dipole. It turns out that we had a good evening with plenty of contacts from coast to coast. It shows that amateur radio enjoyment can be had without a full kilowatt of power and yagis rotating on a 50 foot tower.

Update

It has been a long time since I have taken the time to post on this blog. In the time since I have written I was offered a new job and have since moved. I am still in the process of setting up my a station at my new QTH. I hope to be able to discuss the challenges and successes of installing antennas and setting up the new radios to get back to more operating. There should be plenty of projects that I will discuss on this blog. I already have found and setup my HT to work the local repeaters. I found out that the PL tones used on repeaters is not saved for each individual memory channel. I look forward to posting a status update soon.

Weekend update

This weekend I finally finished adding the radials to the HF vertical antenna. In addition we placed a ground wire to the antenna to protect against a lightning strike. Now we are ready to operate if the transmitter was in condition to work.YQK3QRHYEHZ6

Initial Post

This is my first post on this blog and I haven't thought out all of what this blog will contain. I plan to discuss my ongoing projects. I will also write about my current operating and what is going on the ham bands. For this first post I want to point anyone who runs across this blog to ham nation a great podcast that discusses ham radio on a weekly basis. It is hosted by Bob Heil K9EID who provides a great deal of knowledge about ham radio.