My Emergency Hamstation
I’ve put together a quick and dirty HF emergency amateur radio station. I just moved to this house and haven’t had time to set up any permanent antennas, so I had to improvise. For the rig, I pulled the my Icom 706MKIIG from my vehicle. For antennas, I decided to build something for NVIS communication (near vertical incident skywave). The idea behind NVIS is to bounce a signal straight up off the ground and into the ionosphere, having it bounce straight down. This totally eliminates the skip zone and provides really good regional coverage. In a nutshell, this technique gives a solid radius of about 200-300 miles. The antenna isn’t anything fancy, just a folded 80m dipole at about 3 feet above ground fed with ladder line.
(update, as a 40m NVIS dipole this antenna worked wonderfully…when I folded it into an 80m “loop”, performed miserably.) Next time I’m going to stick with dipoles only when doing NVIS.
My NVIS antenna for 3 MHz - 7 MHz
UPDATE: As a 40m dipole, this antenna worked nicely. folded into a 80m loop, it sucked. It tuned up nicely, but just didn’t radiate well at all. Stick with true dipoles for HF NVIS.
In the event I loose power, I have a 5 watt solar panel that I can charge a gel-cell battery with. This doesn’t sound like much, but it will allow me to receive a couple hours per day and transmit a good 20 minutes or so per day. My dad has an identical solar panel so combining would give double the times above.
Solar Panel
Now that I’m in a house, I really need to get a “base” rig and put this mobile radio back into the car. I’m considering a software-defined radio, the Flex-Radio SDR-1000 in particular http://www.flex-radio.com. I’ve met the designer of this rig and feel it would be a good match with my technical expertise and will present me with a real challenge. In addition, I might also purchase a “boat-anchor” style radio to play with. There’s just something wickedly cool about having a radio with tubes in it.
MF/HF/VHF/UHF radio (ICOM-706MKIIG)
