HF station in a park

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks engrossed in finding new homes for much of Alan and Richard’s SK collection, but today I was able to get out and try to put some of the keepers into action.

I’ve taken the Icom IC-718 and cobbled an HF station around that. I don’t really have room around my home to set up an HF antenna without getting creative, so for now I’m resigned to operating portable. Since I won’t have ideal antenna conditions, I picked up an LDG IT-100, a wide-range automatic antenna tuner that integrates well with that particular transceiver.

Richard had several homemade dipole antennas in his collection, including a very impressive fan dipole with 5 elements. I didn’t take a tape measure so I don’t know exactly which bands it’s supposed to cover, but the full thing is about 60’ wide.

While my kids were playing at a playground, I set up the big fan antenna between a couple of trees. I wasn’t able to get it very high, probably 6’ at the ends and 3’ in the middle. At that height, I wasn’t able to hear very much and didn’t attempt to transmit. I’m sure getting it higher would produce better results; I guess I’ll need an antenna analyser in the near future. For now, I’m just happy that I got the thing deployed at all.