6m

This week, I had a couple of interactions with a company called DX Engineering They're a big ham radio dealer in Ohio that I sometimes buy stuff from.

You see, I got laid off recently and there was a severance, and so after finding new employment, I decided to spend some of the money on some new gear. I've wanted a Yaesu FT-847 for a while now and, while that particular radio is long out of production, it's pretty readily available on the used market. So, I bought one. That's when the trouble began.

Well, I finally went and did it. I built the 6-meter quadrifilar helix I've been talking about for years. Okay, it's not quite done, I'm waiting for a decent pair of wire strippers to arrive, but a week ago I took a four-inch PVC pipe, some 3/8 inch dowels, some Romex, and adhesive and fabricated a QFH antenna. I used a short Python program I wrote to determine the dimensions and, well, I did it wrong. The short wire in what I built should be the long wire at the operating frequency, so the whole thing is too long for the 52 MHz design frequency.

This weekend, is the ARRL's June VHF Contest. I've got quadrifilar helix (QFH) antennas for 2m and 70cm, and they can work for the so-called "weak signal" modes, but I have no 6m antennas at all. I'm thinking of making a 6m QFH antenna to go with the others, but I don't know I can get it done by this weekend. Actually, I'm thinking of making a 10m QFH antenna, too. I've done the calculations needed to figure the sizes it would be.

Anyway, that's what I'm working on now. I'll let you guys know what happens.