Tag Archives: arrl

Apr 12

ARRL Trip – 2011

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On Monday a number of us from DLARC (Delaware-Lehigh Amateur Radio Club) took a field trip to the ARRL Headquarters in Newington, CT and also work the W1AW station.

During the 4 hour trip, I worked a number of DX stations on 17 and 20m including Russia and Belgium. Having HF in the car definitely makes the time go quick, but logging becomes the difficult and hazardous part.

Once on-site, our tour guide took us around league headquarters where we visited the Logbook of the world (LoTW) and certificate department as well as Product Test Lab, Marketing & Advertising, and VEC departments. While there Laurie (KB3SIK) was able to find out the status to her recent upgrade, which happened to arrive in the mail that day. In the outgoing QSL card bureau, we found cards destined for NE3F, the local contest station in Reading, PA, which I found rather funny.

We also had a tour of the ARRL employee station, W1HQ which had a decent amount of gear including a SteppIR beam and 6 meter King Conversion amplifier. I’ll be adding W1HQ to my rare DX list.

It was nice to be put faces and names to the ARRL and see what they do from their perspective. They do alot with what they have and make use of every piece of equipment they have; Something quite apparent in the Lab and Art departments.
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After lunch at a local pizza place, we put in some operating time at W1AW, their visitor operator station. W1AW is also the station that provides the on-air ARRL bulletins as well as qualifying Morse code runs. I ended up running their Yaesu FTDX-9000D on 15m for a bit. The station has alot of different gear and operates a number of modes.
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The remainder of the photos and video can be found here.

Jun 14

June ARRL VHF Contest

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I just got finished up participating in the June ARRL VHF contest, a first for me. With my Field Day expedition only 2 weeks away, this contest was a perfect chance to shake out the portability of my gear.

Initially I started off the contest in a field very close to my QTH with my Icom 706 and an Arrow dual-band satellite antenna. I needed to fabricate a mount where I could easily rotate the yagi as well as adjust azimuth and elevation. I ended up cutting a 1 inch piece of SCH40 PVC at 15 inches long and a piece of SCH40 1 1/4 inch PVC at 6 inches long. I used a hose clamp to secure it down to a photography light stand adapter, as I didn’t have access to a tripod. As you can see in the photos, it seemed to workout just fine for the contest.

Since I was operating the 2nd day of the contest from home, I needed to change the polarity of my Cubex 2m quad antenna to be horizontally polarized. Granted I’ve only made 20 contacts in my first VHF contest, but I ended up having a blast and learning alot.
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Jun 07

Field Day Announcement

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The 1900 Group is planning a Field Day Expedition to Assateague Island, Maryland on June 25th-27th 2010.

Assateague is a desirable operating location for 2 reasons. The first, it’s an IOTA (island on the air), NA-139 is it’s identification. Secondly, it’s in grid square FM-28 which will be a demanded locator if the 6 meter band opens up.

Eric, WG3J has spent countless hours/days working to acquire the necessary permits for operation on the site. Most of that time was spent working with the Park Service for authorization to operate. We plan to be located approximately 100 yards North of the Virginia / Maryland border along the shore.

The website for the operation is finally online. Check it out here!