Today I worked FT8 on my 3rd floor apartment balcony.
My setup was my IC-705. A 3ah Bioenno battery that was half full enabling about 9 watts output. Connected to my radio was an ATU-10 followed by an EARCHI 9:1 that I made when I first got licensed as a General about 5 years ago. This was connected to a 24 foot wire that was mostly vertical up my 7 meter Chinese Tenkara rod and then a short 3-4 foot counterpoise just because I had it and new I needed it.
To my surprise, this janky antenna worked better than my $200 Magloop built specially for the 705 that I ran last night.
So tonight I worked 3 stations on 20 meters and 1 on 30 meters. My ATU had no problems tuning 40 meters, 30 meters, 20 meters, 17, 15, 12 meters. When I tried to tune 10 meters, the audio cut out since I didn’t have any ferrites on my coax (just USB wire) and we know 9:1’s love to throw RF on the coax.
Screenshot of my QSO with CT1BWU – nearly 6,000 miles away in Portugal at 9w on a 9:1.
My apartment faces southwest so I was surprised that I was able to hit Portugal but I did. The wire barely cleared the roof so I have no clue which way the RF actually went. Perhaps it went north over the North Pole.
Its been tough the past year moving from our house in the Boulder area with a 66′ wire in a tree to an apartment with very compromised antenna situations, but I’m happy that I’m on the air again at my QTH at least on FT8.
73,
KV0N
