Wow its 2023. Whats new.

2022 was an interesting year for me. Personal circumstances meant I did very little contesting compares to previous years. Just not as much time as I used to have. I made some changes in 2022 to the ham radio station and I am happy with some and regret others.

Finally got on the Ham Radio satellites properly in 2022. In March I put up and took down the Wimo X-Quads. Its a long story but the 70cms antenna had its best SWR at 451Mhz which is a bit high for 70cms. I never did get back to resolving that and took the quick way out and bought a pare of M2 crossed yagis, the LEO pack. I built a new short (20ft high) mast for the SAT antennas its close to the shack, short cable runs and I only have a mast head preamp on 70cms. Its worked very well. I have 49 country’s worked on SATS and almost 200 grid squares and I got my ARRL VUCC Sats at 100 squares.

Disappointments. I took down my beloved Force 12 C3SS HF 3 band Yagi. Along with the 17m dipole, 6m 5el Yagi, 2m 9el Yagi and 23 element 70cms Yagi. WOW what a lot of hardware up in the air. In there place went a 7 band cobweb, a Diamond X50 and a 4m vertical dipole. The big advantage is I now have the 80m doublet much higher. A good 8 to 10 feet it think but I really miss the yagi on 20, 15 and 10m. The cobweb is affected by weather and detunes easily. Also have not had to lower the mast in bad weather since.

So its 2023. What next. I have restarted doing some work on the WIMO X-Quad for 70cms and I am going to see if I can finally get the issue resolved. The cobweb is going and an HF beam is coming back but not the C3SS. The new beam will be a OptiBeam OB6-3W. Its 1Kg heaver than the C3SS but about 1m shorter boom and looks to have better SWR profile.

I have been building baluns and will be fitting my own to the antenna. I have also built a 4:1 balun which is working very well with the 80m doublet but thinking of a nest of dipoles for 80, 40 and 30m.

I am hoping by the end of March to have the new yagi operational. Just in time for CQWW SSB WPX. If I remember I must photo the construction of the antenna and mounting and post it here.

Enough for now. Back to the CQ WW 160M CW contest for a few hours fun 🙂