Yes...yes. More Comm's

A couple buddies and I are gearing up for the upcoming ARRL Field Day. http://www.arrl.org/field-day Which is basically, for those who don't know, operating amateur radio gear remotely, or "in the field". This is a test of an amateur radio operators' ability to operate during emergency situations, or EMCOMM's (emergency communications).

I've always been interested in EMCOMM's. It's the reason I got my amateur radio license in the first place. I want to be able to communicate and gather information in case the grid goes down.

We are planning on meeting up at a local State Park and camping out for the weekend. We've been bouncing messages back and forth like crazy the last week figuring out what we will do for antennas, power, and radio equipment. I have a couple of new antennas I want to test out specifically during this weekend.

One of them is a "roll-up j-pole". It's basically a length of ladder line antenna wire that is worked into a 2 Meter/440 dual band j-pole antenna. http://www.n9tax.com/Slim%20Jim%20Info.html My buddy ID had one when we met up to go to the Dayton Hamvention. I'd never even heard of them before.

I was impressed with the portability of this antenna. I ended up buying one that already had 16' of coax cable built into it. N9TAX sells all different kinds of them. Different connectors, with or without the coax built into them...stuff like that. I carry mine along with my HT in my EDC pack. With the right adapter, I can simply connect it to my HT and hang it up in the air with a little paracord from a tree or whatever I can find. This will greatly extend the range of my HT. I did this quickly a couple of weeks ago at home. It allowed me to reach one of the local repeaters and check into a Skywarn Net with only 5 Watts of power. I was impressed since I only had the antenna hanging from a hook in the ceiling of my living room. Getting it further up in the air will give me even greater range. It's an awesome piece of gear.

The construction of this antenna is great. It's very well executed. N9TAX knows what he is doing. And the price is right as well. Plus, it will work for the 440 band as well as 2M. My Yaesu VX-6R will work nicely with this antenna.

For those who know about these kinds of things...the SWR on this antenna is really impressive too. The needle barely moved when I hooked it up to my 2M antenna analyzer.

For those who don't...SWR is a measure of how much of your radio signal gets reflected back into the radio. If antenna radiates the signal out effectively, it performs better. High SWR is bad juju. It burns up radios. Low SWR...mmmmm...good. This antenna...very good.

Like I said...I carry mine in a decent sized backpack. It would easily fit into a small fanny pack though. Along with an HT, spare batteries, speaker mic, and a repeater guide...making it a very effective, compact communications option in an emergency.

Matter of fact, I was so impressed with this antenna, I bought another one to hang in my attic permanently. I'm going to run the coax down into my basement so I can hook a radio up to it down there. That way I can operate a radio or just gather information from the safety of my basement if we have a severe storm roll through. Plus, the antenna will be tucked away safety in my attic so I don't have to worry about lighting strikes during thunderstorms. I can still operate during storms. I never would hook up an outside antenna during a thunderstorm.

I'm looking forward to playing with this antenna during Field Day and any time I'm out in the field.

That's all I have for the moment.

PJ