2023: Exploring Options

By the end of 2021 the major antenna work on my station came to an end. That was marked by the raising of the gargantuan 3-element 40 meter yagi. 2022 had so little station work in comparison to the previous 5 years that it almost felt like a vacation. This year I plan to ramp up my activity to refine what I have and make judicious additions and deletions to improve contest and DX results.

Before delving into my 2023 plan, I will first look back on the year that was. I did not achieve all of my objectives of my 2022 plan. That's typical for me. My plans are somewhat aspirational and reality always gets in the way. That's intentional. Aiming high is a strong motivator. But amateur radio is not a job and I am easily distracted by non-ham activities. All I can do is smile and shrug and move onward. 

As I say every year when the very same style of blog article is published: I do this to keep myself honest and to re-calibrate station plans to my objectives and resources. For most readers this may be of minimal interest other than to gain insight into how a ham with a big station thinks, plans and acts. There are likely a few morsels of interest to many readers. I won't be offended if you choose to read no further.

2022 review

My plan for 2022 can be found in an article from last January. I'll quickly step through what did and didn't get done. Refer to that article for the details of each project.

First up was my list of unfinished projects from 2021:

• Stack switch for the 10 meter yagis
• More radials for the 160 meter antenna
• Efficiency improvements for the 80 meter vertical yagi
• VHF antennas: longer boom 6 meter antenna, and an antenna for 2 meter DXing
• Antennas for the WARC bands: 30, 17 and 12 meters

Of these, only the 10 meter stack switch was completed in 2022. Oh well. I'll come back to these when I discuss the 2023 plan. Let's return to the other items on the 2022 plan.

• Prop pitch motors: I did complete the rebuild and I redid both direction pots. What I didn't do was improve the controller in the shack. I did get as far as designing and bread boarding the direction pot circuits. I still have to build complete controllers for the two prop pitch motors.
• 160 meters: Although I continued to evaluate alternatives I ended the year with the same shunt fed tower transmit antenna. It's a great antenna but it can be better yet.
• VHF: No new VHF antennas were built and raised, and indeed were not even designed. I had so much fun last year on 6 meters that I didn't care all that much.
  
• WARC band antennas: Again, nothing was done. 12, 17 and 30 meters get little priority since they're not contest bands and I pretty well only chase new countries and band-countries on those bands. Something will eventually have to be done.
  
• 40 meter yagi matching network: With a couple of capacitance hats breaking off it seemed pointless to play with the feed point match. I found this project easy to defer.
  
• 80 meters: About the only part of my plan to improve the 3-element vertical yagi was to acquire a tower so that I can make it more robust, remove the stinger and support an even better stinger to make the antenna more efficient on 160 meters. I am deferring other improvements until that is done. No horizontal antenna, yagi or otherwise, went up last year. I've been debating alternatives.
  
• Station automation: I've made significant progress but I've yet to cross the finish line. I have used the system live on the air but not yet in a contest. The latter was too risky since I expected hardware and software bugs to arise. They have though nothing serious.
  
• Station modernization: I am a trained procrastinator. Once again I failed to update the rigs. I did lots of shopping and evaluating alternative transceivers, and failed to click 'buy'. With station automation and other projects incomplete, and not quite ready to invite guest operators, I decided to defer the purchase. Who knows, a fancy new rig will hit the market and scream 'buy me!"
  
• Receive antennas: I had enough of a struggle repairing lightning damage to the Beverages and clearing rapidly regrowing bush and deer damage to spend time on a second receive system for the low bands.
  

Among the reasons not everyone got done was maintenance. A station this size requires a lot of it and I really didn't plan for it in my schedule. These included difficulty with the repair of the faulty prop pitch motor, lightning damage to the Beverage system, cable problems, etc. 

As always I could allocate more time to my many projects but I don't and I won't. This is a hobby, not a job, and when I feel like doing something else or nothing at all, I do! No excuses necessary. Now it's time to look forward to 2023.

As the title says, 2023 is the year to explore options. The station is in pretty good shape at this stage, and most projects are improvements and refinements rather than major construction projects. I hinted at a few of the projects in a recent article.

40 meters

As hinted in a recent article, I am building models for a reversible 40 meter Moxon. Most of the compass that thus be covered on the rotatable side mount currently occupied by a TH6 tri-band yagi. I have most of the aluminum in my stock. By making it reversible I can easily use one antenna to quickly switch between Europe and much of the US. The height is ideal for the latter and pretty good for the former.

Disposition of the XM240 is uncertain. I may deploy it as a fixed side mount for, say, Caribbean and South America, which is a valuable source of multipliers but not QSOs. I am souring on the inefficiency of coil-loaded element. With the big push over I have more time to pursue 1 or 2 db of gain improvement, and with improved F/B and SWR across the full 300 kHz of 40 meters.

I might first purchase a NEC5 license for EZNEC so that the design can be accurately modelled. It is not possible with NEC2, not even as enhanced in EZNEC. That will save me the trial and error I went through with the 3-element yagi element design.

The design of the capacitance hats on the 3-element yagi must be improved. I should have done a better job so I have no one to blame but myself. I lost 2 arms (out of 24) to metal fatigue, and I would not be surprised to lose more. I have a new design and enough material to trial it on the driven element. The ends of the driven element are easily reached by rotating it on the boom. 

Accessing the capacitance hats on the other two element is far more difficult. Recall that the boom is 46' and the antenna weighs 300 lb! A friend and I have come up with a method to rotate the element tips in towards the tower for the repair. The work will easily occupy a full day. Hopefully it'll be done before the summer heat arrives.

80 meters

I have planned improvements to the 80 meter vertical ever since I built it. These include

• Wire element shape to improve gain
• More radials to improve efficiency
• Taller tower for the driven element so that the fragile stinger can be removed and the supports for the wire elements moved higher

Of these, I only expect to do the last in 2023. I will probably wait until late summer to do the work. The existing tower must be taken down, the base widened and improved, new guy anchors buried, and the new tower raised. The work is straight-forward but will take time.

Once the new tower is up I can pursue the other improvements at my leisure. A switchable side-mounted stinger of up to 10 meters height may be added to improve its efficiency on 160 meters.

As time goes by, I am convinced that I must have a horizontal antenna on 80 meters. When operating lower power or QRP in a contest, the vertical yagi alone isn't good enough. Many of the stations I need to work are within 1000 km, and when I operate with 100 watts or QRP. I miss working many stations. I learned that lesson, again, in this month's NAQP CW contest, and Sweepstakes CW before that. With a kilowatt the problem largely vanishes.

The antenna doesn't need to have gain, just horizontal polarization. I intend to once again raise my trusty old inverted vee to an apex height of about 100' (31 m). There are deployment options that I am modelling and interactions with yagis on the tower to be assessed. That will be the subject of a future article.

160 meters

I have two 160 meter projects this year. One is more radials for the shunt-fed tower, which I never did get done last year in time for the winter season. What I'd really like to do is build a small "plow" to bury the radials. It needs to be mechanized, perhaps attached to my mower, since there are almost 500 meters of wire (16 × 30 meters).

Burying the radials means no more rolling them out in the fall and rolling them up in the spring. Farm equipment used for haying will be unimpeded and the antenna will be operational the entire year. I don't operate much in the summer but it would be nice to have an effective antenna for DXpeditions and the occasional summer contest.

Radial burial reduces the urgency of an enhanced 160 meter option for the 80 meter vertical yagi, as described above. In some respects, the latter may be more convenient except in contests when it is necessary to be on 80 and 160 meters at the same time. Winter nights are long and the low bands are unavoidable.

Phasing the two towers for added gain is unlikely to go far this year. However, if I make the radial plow I may bury a set of radials for the second tall tower in preparation for the phasing project in 2024.

High bands

I have plenty of antennas for 20, 15 and 10 meters. The problem is that I am not getting the most out of them. The side mount yagis either don't rotate or have limited rotation. The upper yagis of the 15 and 20 meter stacks rotate together, and they rotate slowly because the prop pitch motors turn close to half the speed of rotators most hams use.

I would like to use swing gates to rotate the (currently fixed on Europe) lower yagis for 10 and 15 meters. That is unlikely to progress far this year other than design and prototyping in the workshop. The operational and maintenance burden of additional rotators and control cables gives me pause.

As a nearer term alternative I would like a full rotatable tri-band yagi on a fast rotator. This is a contest requirement, and is not needed for daily operating. Hunting multipliers and testing propagation requires fast reactions while not conflicting with the use of the high band stacks, which are likely to be in heavy use.

Since I am increasingly averse to the inefficiency of trapped yagis, I would prefer a tri-bander without traps. These are commercially available, but I'd like to take a shot at designing and building one of my own. They are challenging antennas to design due to the element interactions. The antenna doesn't have to be extremely large. 3-elements on 20 meters, and 3 or 4 on 15 and 20 meters is enough.

Can I do it this year? Perhaps not. Assuming the XM240 is removed from the Trylon tower in favour of the prospective reversible 40 meter Moxon mentioned above, the TH6 could be put on the Trylon until I have a better option.

The TH7 remains on the ground and will probably be sold. It isn't doing any good buried under the snow.

WARC bands

The 80 meter inverted vee should work reasonably well on 30 meters, or at least it has in the past. The pattern has multiple lobes (as expected) and the SWR won't be too dreadful. That may be good enough for chasing DXpeditions and the like. 

Even if it's not the best antenna to use it will be better than the 80 meter vertical I'm currently using. None of my other low band antennas are effective on 30 meters, and I would prefer not to occupy valuable tower space with a dedicated 30 meter antenna.

My antenna objectives for 12 and 17 meters are modest. I want a resonant antenna with a little directivity. A dual band 2-element yagi would be enough for me. I could mount the elements on a 40 meter yagi boom or build an entirely new antenna. It isn't difficult to design and build from scratch. The problem is the tower space and coax. 

A 5-band Spiderbeam or a hex beam are alternatives that suit my objective of a trap-free tri-band yagi. Since neither antenna can easily coexist with a second yagi on the same mast due to their mechanical complexity, they are not at the top of my priority list.

Receive antennas

I am happy to report that the entire Beverage system is back in service. It took me a while to gather the parts needed to rebuild the last of the reversible Beverage electronics. It went smoothly, and this time there were no construction and testing errors.

The station automation system (see below) is far enough advanced that the Beverage directions control works. Just click the buttons with a mouse. 

This year I need to decide whether to disconnect and ground the Beverages during the summer months when lightning is likely. I can't easily reverse the decision because the hay fields and bush are difficult to get into and are full of Lyme carrying ticks. I prefer to wait until the end of summer to reconnect them. 

The alternative is to add effective lightning protection to the system. I've been researching the matter and pricing components. It's not as difficult or expensive as I once believed. It is worth pursuing. Whether I do so before lightning season arrives is uncertain. 

I would like to prototype a second receive antenna this year, made with short phased vertical. The objectives are to test performance and whether home brewing is viable. This could expand into a full sized vertical receive array or just a minimal system for use during the summer months and for the second operator position during contests. The Beverage system supports just one direction and receiver at a time.

Station automation

This is another carryover from 2022. Except that I'm pleased to say that I'm getting close to completion of the new software driven system. It's been used for casual operating but not yet for contesting. There are as yet too many gaps and inadequate testing to trust it in a contest. That will soon change.

Features still to be added include BPF (band pass filter) switching, 160 on the 80 meter yagi, manual operation when N1MM fails or isn't being used, and several other operational and failure-mode functions.

I was slowed by other projects and an unwillingness to stare at a screen or soldering iron when the weather was still fine. The mess of wiring and tiny connectors have been a psychological barriers: the work is not difficult but tedious and exacting, and old people like me have little patience.

I've run into puzzling problems with managing and bonding the DC grounds in my station which, when thrown together into a unified stack of hardware, cause a variety of electrical malfunctions. These have been mostly eradicated and I have a plan to deal with the rest. 

There were software integration problems that made the system difficult to use in a contest. Those have also, for the most part, been resolved. I had much to learn about other software systems (N1MM, Windows APIs, etc.) to make everything play together nicely.

Once I have it fully working I will further develop the software to make it easier on the eyes, improve multi-op support, and migrate the software to a separate computer with a touch screen. I'll have more to say about these and more in future articles.

Prop pitch motors

I have the circuit design for the direction indicators and I have the relays for motor control to build prettier and better rotator controllers for the two prop pitch motors. I have already mentioned that I want to adapt orphan Hy-Gain rotator controllers for this purpose. Many hams have done this and they look really (and work) really good.

There are other improvement planned this year. Last year I built new direction pot systems, and although they are working well there is room for improvement. The immediate need is the belt drive between the mast and pot on the tower with 20 and 15 meter stacks. I have gathered almost all the parts I'll need, but I will wait for warmer weather. It is not an emergency.

Tension on the chain for the chain drive prop pitch motor driving the 3-element 40 meter yagi and upper 10 meter yagi is difficult to adjust. Slack in the chain allows the antenna to rock back and forth, providing a longer runway for wind induced acceleration and thus more momentum to be absorbed by the motor and tower.

I have ideas on how to adjust the tension without altering the existing system. I would like to try one of them this year.

Station modernization

Transceivers are at the core of any station. I have deferred several decisions until I decide on what current generation rigs to purchase since they impact station automation and peripheral integration. I can say that at this point I am leaning strongly towards the Icom 7610.

If that's what I do, the 7610 would become the primary rig and the FTdx5000 relegated as the second rig. The FT950 will be disconnected and kept as a spare. The resale value is low enough that it makes more sense to keep it as insurance again rig failures during a contest.

It is unlikely that I will purchase a new amplifier this year. Then again, I might accelerate my plan. My next amp will be solid state with automatic band switching and tuning. There are several ways this is being accomplished in current products and I have no favourite at the moment. Quite a few innovative designs have been introduced in the last year or two and more are likely to appear.

Although I have no other modernization plans for 2023, I am biased in my assessments of equipment for their openness and ease of software integration. Hardware jacks for control functions will be rejected in favour of wireless and IP communication.

Back to work

I will try to use the software system in the CQ 160 contest this weekend. I hate the knob and switch on the manual antenna switch which are very hard on the fingers. Who knows, I might get a sore wrist and finger from excessive clicking of buttons on the screen instead!

Indoor projects will keep me busy during this coldest time of winter. There is time enough in the warmer weather to dive into my 2023 station plan. Or so I hope. I get distracted easily, and since I'm retired that rarely has negative consequences. Discipline fades over time without a externally imposed schedule, such as that from a job. I can live with that.