[OZAPRS] How much power do you use while HF mobile?

Damien Gardner Jnr vk2tdg at gmail.com
Fri Jun 10 18:35:04 EST 2011


Hi Folks,

So I dug out a spare welding rod, and made a new tip for the 30 metre whip on the the car, so I could run HF as well as VHF while we're away this long weekend.  Didn't last long, it disappeared somewhere through kangaroo valley, but we did get excellent coverage all the way down till then :)  Will go hunting around nowra tomorrow and see if I can find a source of 3mm welding rods, or (haha not a chance) 3mm stainless rod, but for now I picked up a $4 fold-out mosquito net thingo from the camping section at kmart, for putting over a plate..  That had about 1mm rods in it, cut it to the 152mm I usually cut to, but it was centered about 300khz too far up the band..  cut a new one 3cm longer, and bingo, 1.1 swr on 10.1mhz :)  Gotta say having the LCD backlight set to go from blue to red on SWR during transmit is absolutely fantastic - you know straight away if something's wrong!

Anyway, my question - While i was giving the car a test-drive with the antenna on, on thursday morning, I had my HF SSID appear on my D710 - seems it was picked up somewhere and gated around about and ended up out on VHF via an igate...  What did surprise me, was I still had the 857 set to 5w, from tuning in the antenna!  Now I usually run 50w on HF, but having done lots of playing with PSK31 and the like recently, I'm realising that power really doesn't make a whole lot of difference on HF, and having landed in noosa on 5w, I'm wondering if I need to be running 50W..

Sooo - what power do folks usually run on HF APRS? :)

Cheers,

Damien

VK2TDG


More information about the OZAPRS mailing list