6m Antenna Upgrade Part 1 – Plans for Antenna Enhancements

I’ve been very active on 6m over the past several years. I am closing in on DXCC and Worked All States on the magic band. I operate on 6m daily during Es season. We are also very active in VHF contesting on the 6m band and have worked just under 700 grids on 6m.  This … Continue reading

EME Station 2.0 Part 1 – Goals and Station Design

EME or Earth-Moon-Earth contacts involve bouncing signals off the moon to make contacts. EME provides a means to make DX contacts using the VHF and higher bands. There are also some EME Contests including the ARRL EME Contest that provides opportunities to make EME contacts. We made some 2m EME contacts a while ago using … Continue reading

Satellite Station 4.0 Part 9 – Upgraded Simple Portable Station

Portable Satellite and Grid Square Activation Station We were up on Mt. Washington here in New Hampshire this past weekend and decided to use the SOTA activation to test our updated Portable Satellite Station 4.0. It turned out that the station was also a great SOTA and Grid Square Activation station for terrestrial contacts. An upgraded … Continue reading

160m Portable Antenna System for Field Day

The Nashua Area Radio Society tries to do something new each time we engage in an Emcom or other major operation. We decided to try Winter Field Day for the first time this year and we made one of our new elements a capable 160m portable antenna system and station for 160m. It’s almost impossible to … Continue reading

Satellite Station 4.0 Part 7 – Flex SDR Satellite Transceiver

A major part of our plans for Satellite Station 4.0 includes the ability to operate our home satellite station remotely over the Internet. We’ve been using our Flex-6700 Software Defined Radio (SDR) as a Remote Operating Gateway (GW) on the HF Bands and 6m for some time now. Our latest project is to upgrade our … Continue reading

ISS Crew Contact Part 1 – Ground Station Design and Construction

Ground Station for Satellites and the ISS Our planned ISS Crew Contact is almost here! It will take place sometime during the first week of December (December 3rd – 8th) at the Hudson Memorial School (HMS) here in Hudson, NH. I am planning a series of articles here on our blog to explain the process … Continue reading

Satellite Station 4.0 Part 3 – Antenna Integration and Testing

Satellite Antennas Off The Tower Sometimes we learn from problems and mistakes. We all go through this from time to time. It is part of the learning aspect of Amateur Radio. My most recent experience came while integrating our new tower-based satellite antenna system. After the antennas were up, initial testing revealed the following problems: A … Continue reading

DX’ing and Operating Award Tips

We’ve been pretty active in Operating Award programs since we built our station a few years back. Operating Awards provide incentives to get on the air and chase all kinds of contacts and they also help us to understand our station’s and our personal operating strengths and weakness. They also provide motivation to improve the … Continue reading

A Portable Satellite Station Part 1 – A Simple Station for AO-85

Our club, the Nashua Area Radio Club, has quite a few members who are interested in space communications. We built a simple portable satellite station last year for our 2016 Field Day operation to learn about satellite communications and create something new for folks to work with during 2016 Field Day. Our 1.0 Portable Satellite … Continue reading

A Portable Satellite Station Part 2 – 2.0 Station Goals and Antenna System

We came upon the M2 Antenna Systems booth while walking around the exhibit halls at Dayton last year. M2 had one of their LEO Pack satellite antenna systems on display there. This got us thinking about building a new, more capable version of our portable satellite station. The LEO Pack is a relatively lightweight circularly … Continue reading