Gotta Get the KX2 Out by WV0H Myron

I decided to get the KX2 out and have a little fun with the Park Portable Doublet antenna at a local park, er, open space as they say here in Colorado. Hmm, Open Space Doublet... The open space is just a short walk away from home and the temperature was forecast to be in the 60°F range.

I used my KX2 with my repurposed Dell Laptop battery that our IT department throws out at work. I started out on 20m where I heard KX0R George, working DX from a Colorado summit with SOTA. I worked him and made my way down to 30m where I was planning on meeting my friends, John KN5L, and Steve, KF5RY out in a park in Texas as well.

The Open Space Doublet consists of 2-60 foot #26 PTFE wires, a 50:800 ohm conventional transformer at the feed point. The poles hold the antenna up approximately 30 feet above ground and the end supports are two 19'-6' poles. One end pole is up on the metal fence post shrub holder so the end of the wire is slightly higher by 4 feet on one end.

I took many a video but it turns out my Canon S95 camera failed to capture any sound...like the microphones are not working.

The clip is a repurposed binder clip.

I have a great bunch of video sitting on my repurposed Buddistick ball mount steady as a rock, filming, nothing but...video of me sending and seeing the S-meter go up and down...

The OSD spreader spaces the transmission line apart 9 inches and is very low loss, like 0.1dB (for this 30 foot length) at 14 MHz. (measured on my antenna test range...the back yard).

The SimSmith model shows a nice efficiency transferring the power to the antenna, the red trace on the square chart. The blue trace is the SWR presented to the KXAT2 (antenna tuner) in the rig.

I worked about 5 guys and said hello to about a dozen people out walking around.

All of this is packed into my normal sized backpack. I carry the poles by hand. I ended up swapping out the orange Nite-Ize twist ties for some Velcro straps to hold the poles together and to bind the pole to the fence post shrub holder thingy.

73,
Myron WVØH
Printed On Recycled Data