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

[Steve]

G'day Damien,

My Wagner is wound down to 15W. I've tried to make a compact HF APRS 
unit with it. It has an embedded TT3, and a DB9 plug on the side to 
accept (and power) a serial GPSr.
I've never had it mobile (waiting for a use for it really -  maybe I'll 
get a 4WD one day?), but the antenna systems I use to test with won't be 
much better than a good mobile station I'd say!
When I arc it up for a test, I usually get a packet in to one of the 
NSW, QLD or VIC I-Gates within two or three transmit attempts during the 
day. I'm located near Canberra and the band is 30M.

I love QRP though, so I'm looking at your 5W story and thinking should I 
go down a bit more?

I'd be interested in some more "real world" stories too.

:-)

Steve VK2ZSZ



On 06/10/2011 06:35 PM, Damien Gardner Jnr wrote:
> 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
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