Radio work as a new amateur

I've been having a lot of fun working HF and a few local repeaters, so I wanted to share my experiences as a newcomer to the hobby who is one of the dreaded new No-code Extras.

Starting off, I had a lot of luck just tuning around the New York City area 2m repeaters. There were a lot of friendly folks on the air, and it got me in the habit of good QSO procedure. When I moved from the mobile antenna mounted to the balcony railing to a rotated yagi on the roof, my goal was to reach repeaters as far away as possible. I was particularly interested in reaching repeaters closer to the catskills...

The most consistent repeater I was able to reach is the KC2DAA repeater on Mount Beacon. This repeater hosts the Hudson Valley net as well as some activities of the MBARC such as a semi-weekly Satcom net for discussion of area satellite work.

It took about a month to get word of my General/Extra upgrade. At that point I was diliberating a solution for multiband HF access. Quite a few people extolled the virtues of the G5RV and the price was right. It turned out that I didn't have as much room for a wire antenna as I thought. I did manage to use the G5RV for a few 6m and 20m contacts at a friend's house in the Catskills.

After ruling out any sort of wire antenna, I turned to the vertical. At the time, the only real benefit that I realized is that a vertical is self supporting. I planned to mount the antenna on the roof of the apartment which is about 40 feet above ground and contains very little metal mass.

I ruled out the radial-less half-wave designs primarily because of their comprimised design, and mixed results in the review pages of eham.net. Of the multiband 1/4 wave designs I settled on the Butternut HF9V with the tuned radial kit. Installation and tuning whent great, and I am constantly surprised about how well it performs.

In the end, another huge benefit of the 1/4 wave vertical design is the low radiation angle which makes it great for DX work. In fact, it's so good, my country list is longer than my state list!

States Worked

• Alabama
• Massachusetts
• Mississippi
• Ohio
• South Carolina

Countries Worked

• Europe
• Spain
• France
• Hungary
• Italy
• Norway
• Czech Republic
• Slovak Republic
• Belgium
• Russia
• North America
  
• Cuba
• Honduras
• Canada
• USA
• Mexico
• Trinidad & Tobago
• South America
• Columbia
• Argentina
• Venezuela

Since I'm only running 100 watts, I'm limited to conditions which haven't been great. That being the case, I've been able to make at least one 5x9 contact with any given attempt.