Foundations of Amateur Radio

There is some truth in simplicity. I've mentioned in the past that "suck it and see" is a perfectly valid solution to figuring out if something is going to work or not.

I've moved into my new home, my new QTH. The roof is colour bond, that's basically a corrugated iron roof, painted in some random colour. I think it's grey, but don't quote me on that, could be green.

Inside is a mezzanine floor, essentially carving out a space within the roof area. It's going to be my office and radio shack, so after setting up technology, I had a spare 15 minutes and came across a box that had my radio bits inside it. After setting up power I went and combed through some more crates to locate a magnetic mount and the vertical I use on 2m and 70cm in my car.

The roof beam is held up by a steel post which forms part of the railing that surrounds the mezzanine floor.

All conventional wisdom tells me that this is a poor place for an antenna.

So, undeterred with little else in the way of simple options, I stuck my magnetic mount to the steel post with my vertical attached. Of course this doesn't mean that I have my vertical actually mounted vertically, in fact it's not, it's horizontal.

So, there's one of two steel posts that holds up the steel roof, a magnetic mount stuck to the side of the post with a vertical, running horizontally.

It keyed up the local repeater the first time. Made some contacts, spoke to three local amateurs to confirm that they could in fact hear me, swapped sides on the post, from parallel to the roof line to 90 degrees off the side with some improvement.

Now as I said, on paper this shouldn't work. The roof beam runs north-south, the repeater is off to the east of the pitched roof, so the signal isn't making its way off the ends, it's going through the roof, or I've managed to use the roof post as an antenna, or the roof, or both, or the signal is bouncing down, over a metal fence, who knows.

The point is, it works when anyone you'd have asked about this would have rightly told you that it won't.

When I asked recently what the ideal shack should look like, one person who travelled a lot pointed out that just enough shack is a good place to start. Right now, I'm a power supply, radio and a horizontally mounted vertical into the minimal shack.

I was asked if I'd tested HF yet. Seriously, the radio is 15 minutes out of the box. But in a word, yes. I put on a 10m vertical, also mounted horizontally, same magnetic mount and I can hear the local beacon on 10m, 12m and 15m, a vast improvement on my previous HF experiences at home. Overall the noise on the bands seems less than it was in my old house - this could be because of shielding of the roof, or it could just be less actual noise, or because my antenna is mounted horizontally. Previously I had S9 noise, now it peaks at S5, but on average it's around S2-3. This is not a proper test by any stretch of my imagination and while initial indicators are better, this is by no means a definitive test of the HF band.

For my next trick I'll be taking a closer look at the railing that surrounds my office, It's made from stainless steel stranded wire, the stuff you find on a boat, with seven strands to choose from, in three separate orientations, so plenty of room for experimentation and more if I dare to use the strands on the staircase, seriously, I won't be.

One thing I will do before I start keying up for the next HF contact is do some electro magnetic radiation research to learn if I'm in the danger zone, or if my family might be exposed to unsafe levels of RF radiation. Normally this isn't an issue with 5 watts when the antenna is on a roof, but now I have it indoors I'll spend some time making sure.

I still have a magnetic loop on loan from a friend, packed away in a box that I'll unearth in the next couple of days to see what it has to say about the new RF environment.

As I said this is just the beginning and I've not yet been calling CQ or checking out the local HF nets.

What crazy set-ups do you admit to, that actually worked, even though they shouldn't have?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB