[SCCC] New member (W6PNG) ....some of my portable contest station home-brew projects.

[Paul Gacek]

Hi all,

I just joined the SoCal Contest Club.

Living in Laguna Beach (which is a great place) has its draw backs especially around putting up a descent antenna and even if i could do that the 1,000 ft hills to my east don’t help with DX to Europe, Africa etc.

My solution has been to operate radios from remote locations such as mountain tops trying hard to avoid the blistering heat or frigid cold but not always that successfully. Most of the 200 or so peaks in the last 3 years have been fun and I'm eternally indebted to the SOTA program.

This inevitably morphed into a trip to the exotic island of Saint Lucia with the Buddipole team in late 2016 and from that I’ve become quite fascinated in the idea of operating from exotic islands and locations around the world.  Best time to go is during a contest and with that I made a couple of trips to Costa Rica to participate in the ARRL DX Phone and last summer to Ken’s VY2TT station in PEI (Canada). 

My take on this to have a station that can be transported as checked baggage on a plane as this makes the world more accessible and more affordable. Someone else nicely coined this as “suitcase DXPedition”.

Size and girth work against you in this world and I set to to try and find gizmos that make operating a station easier, more effective, faster. Most failed the size and girth test and so I optimistically (that I am) set off down a path of build your own. I’ve borrowed from others who are far more experienced than me including Paul Young, I’ve found PCBs to use such as Mikael Larsmark’s and study the work of masters such as Jack Brindle.

It's been fun and here is the third installment in this little “maker” journey.

https://nomadic.blog/2019/04/07/suitcase-dxpedition-2x6-antenna-switch/ <https://nomadic.blog/2019/04/07/suitcase-dxpedition-2x6-antenna-switch/>

and in case you missed the first two installments….

https://nomadic.blog/2019/01/09/suitcase-dxpedition-station-automation-part-2-an-arduino-based-so2r-controller/ <https://nomadic.blog/2019/01/09/suitcase-dxpedition-station-automation-part-2-an-arduino-based-so2r-controller/>

https://nomadic.blog/2019/01/07/suitcase-dxpedition-station-automation-step-1-the-elecraft-krc2/ <https://nomadic.blog/2019/01/07/suitcase-dxpedition-station-automation-step-1-the-elecraft-krc2/>

I’m looking forward to adding my contest scores (no matter how small) to the SCCC tally.

Paul
W6PNG/M0SNA