Been out a bit with a nice event held in Naples, Florida by the ministerial association that ordained me. We had a great time meeting old friends and making some new friends. Our hotel was extremely nice and we had a 5th floor room with balcony to play qrp portable from too! The weather was not very good and we did not get a lot of air time, but had fun experimenting with my Buddistick on 40 and 20m.

Not a bad view from our 5th floor perch, eh?

The counterpoise was dropped over the edge to a conveniently placed palm tree that was just right for the 40m length and a bit short for 20m ops. Next time I’ll take my bicycle flag and use it to keep the counterpoise a bit further out from the building and operate more of an “L” configuration to see how that works.

I picked up 200′ of nice 26 gauge Teflon insulated wire at the Ft. Pierce (FL) hamfest and have worked on a couple new portable antenna options. Recently I got a great deal on Ebay and acquired 4 Coleman camping clothesline reels which I put to use making a couple end fed halfwaves and counterpoise.

Matching XFMR and 3 of my antenna reels

I’m still tweaking on my EFHW Tuner modeled after the SLT+ but using RF chokes rather than toroids. So far, I’m not satisfied with it, but perhaps it is my novice building skills that created the problem. hi hi. So I am working on a couple other tuners. I found a very interesting lite weight idea on WA5BDU’s website. So of course, I had to try it.

WA5BDU 40m EFHW matching XFMR

The rain came shortly after I got setup at the nearby lake park, but I was able to get a 1:7 to 1 SWR without any tweaking of counterpoise or antenna length. So with some time to tweak I think I should be able to improve on this tunerless matching transformer. YAHOO… stay tuned.