First QCX Mini POTA Activation
The next day I decided to do a quick activation at K-5444, Mohican State Forest, in Ohio, which is just a few miles from my house. One problem, my main POTA antenna is always some kind of non-resonant vertical, and I let my LDG autotuner take care of the matching for me. Since I don’t have a tuner for the QCX-mini, I needed a resonant antenna.
Fortunately I use a Spiderbeam 40 ft. mast, which allows me all kinds of options. So I took aproximately 34 ft. of wire and hoisted it up with the Spiderbeam and adjusted the length with my MFJ antenna analyser. I quickly got a 1:1.2 match on the CW end of 40 meters.
in case anyone is wondering, I attach the coax shield to the body of the Jeep as it exits the rear hatch. Once the mast is hoisted I attach the center conductor of the coax to the 34 ft. wire that is supported by the mast. Basically this is a full sized 1/4 wave vertical that uses the car body as the ground plane.
One thing is for sure, when doing a POTA activation with the QCX-mini, the amount of gear needed is much less, which means loading out is much faster. My main POTA setup uses an FT-857D with a Raspberry Pi for the logging computer. It works well, but the goal with the QCX-mini is to go small and light.
With this in mind, I decided to run a logging program on my phone, which is an Android based phone. I found VLS Logger, which is very POTA friendly, as it supports the two required fields in the ADIF file, SIG_INFO and MY_SIG_INFO.
Tell me about the CW assist. I am fair at CW but an assist, that works well, to help decode and double check me would be very useful. Did it work? Thanks
Good question! I was going to talk about that but forgot to. I fiddled with it a little and was not real impressed. Maybe if I had spent more time with it perhaps it would have worked.
One nice thing about POTA, is their spotting page: pota.us What I encourage people to do when they are learning CW is to find a POTA CW spot. The spot has all the info to make a legit POTA QSO. So all you really need to be able to do is to copy your own call. So when you hear your call, just send his RST and your state abbreviation. The POTA rules for a QSO are very laid back.
Hope this helps!
— Mike
The CW Assist (decoder) works great, but requires getting it setup correctly. I am no expert at it at all, but I fiddled around with the settings on it and it works very well if everything is working properly. That would include band conditions being good. I know you have to set noise floor level, and wpm inside the decoder menu.
I have found out that you want your volume down enough that it mainly hears the CW tones and not all the background noises on the band. All the hissing and noise on the band the CW decoder tries to decode. But a good clean CW signal it does fine.
I have the original QCX in 40 Meter and just built the QCXmini in 40 Meter and I believe the decoder is better than what it was in the the original QCX.
Glad you had a blast with yours. I am now tempted to go out and try my QCXmini with my EF random wire antenna I built.
73 Juddie WD8WV
Hello and thank you for you input on the CW assist. Can you please share your parameters that you used to get it working properly?
— Mike