HF Operations

Since moving to the Idaho QTH, I have engaged in mainly HF ops on 75 and 40. Recently have been hanging out on 17m meeting some new folk.

My tranciver is a Ten-Tec JUPITER running w/ v1.26 b7 firmware. It has all the hardware mods as of 01-FEB-06. I love it. It is a great old mans radio with an easy to read display and none of the rice box "gee whiz" cascading menus.

I check into the Montana Traffic Net and sometimes meet my dear friend Les - N7CMJ. Les and I chat frequently on 160m.

I only have one HF antenna up, an 80m full wave horizontal loop. I use it on 80m>10m, loading it w/ a Palstar BT1500A balanced tuner thru 430 ohm window line. I feed the lader line through the shack wall w/ homebrew beehive insulators made from some ceramic electric fence insulators, brass threaded rod/nuts/washers and 3/8 poly tubing:

The window line is terminated in the shack with two "banana" jacks with a banana plug post on each of the Palstar balanced outputs.

For 160, I plug both banana jacks of the window line into a pair of shorted banana plug posts on the "long wire" output of my Nye Viking MB-IV. Really works good by the signal reports I'm getting.

My ground consists of two 8ft ground rods seperated by 6ft, driven down along the foundation parallel the shack wall. The ground rods are soldered together with a 2in by .020in copper strip running along the base of the foundation. Another 2in copper strip is soldered at a right angle into the ground rod "tie" strip, which is routed directly up under a window sill to the Nye-Viking ground point, then on to other equipment. Total ground length to the Nye-Viking is around 4.5ft.

Someday, I just might wire up an 40 amp DPDT open frame relay to switch the window line and an old Dow Key to move the RF between tuners for a "flip of the switch" move to and from 160m.