开云体育

I had intended on building up a V6 as a mobile radio, and even started a thread on it, but sometimes things change.? My first V6 has wound up at our cabin for full-time duty there (don't want to have to carry electronics back and forth) so I was needing a new home shack radio.

I built the second V6 fully intending for it to be a mobile radio but after finishing the build it was a bit larger than I envisioned so I decided this would be a perfect replacement for my shack V6.? Now I was back to square one and the lightbulb went on and I decided a BITX40 would be a perfect small-footprint radio.? I had picked up a couple BITX40 boards from?N8DAH and found that they worked great so I built one into a small aluminum enclosure.? First off I flashed the Nano with Allard's firmware and installed his mods on the board and then installed an AGC board from Kit-Projects, tacked on a Cobra power mic, and finished it off with an ATU-100 antenna tuner modded for QRP use.?

The entire package turned out very compact, just a bit thicker than my Icom IC-2300H 2 meter radio.? I paired this up with a 40M ham-stick style antenna on a trailer hitch mount.? Everything I read said the spiral wound antennas left a lot to be desired and the hitch mount was the worst place to mount the antenna but my options were limited.? No matter how hard I tried I could not get the SWR below a little over 2.5:1 so after a bit of web-surfing I clipped a 300 pf capacitor between the base of the antenna and ground with an alligator clip test lead and the SWR dropped to 1.06:1!? I thought, Sweet!!? I went ahead and added just the capacitor to the antenna and the SWR went back to a bit over 2.5...? I added in the test lead and the SWR dropped back down so I measured out a length of wire equal to the test lead, coiled it up, and put it in series with the capacitor and wound up with an SWR of around 1.2 (at 7.240 MHz).? I'll have to come up with a more permanent arrangement as just a minute repositioning of this "coil" greatly impacts the SWR.

All good stories have happy endings and after getting the match more or less straightened out I was about to make a contact in LA, about 300 miles away so I can say that mobile, QRP, SSB is possible!? I still have? to mount the ATU-100 (thinking about just velcroing it to the top of radio) but this is how it turned out.





73,

Justin B.
KI5GKD

Good Stuff!

Me and some buddies took a open trailer of motorcycles from Pennsylvania to Florida and back one weekend and I brought the bitx40 along. I too used a 40m ham stick with a "jaws of life" clamp mount on the trailer rail. I sat in the back seat of that truck and worked 40m up and down route 95. It worked GREAT, made a surprising amount of contacts.

I'll be heading up to OK in a few weeks but it will be daytime so I doubt I'll see much action.? I am going to try to activate? for POTA while I am there so we'll see how that goes.