Wire + Tree + Catapult = HF portable

Today I decided to put a wire in a tree and see if anyone could hear me. While portable for a couple of days I thought it would be fun to use one of the very tall trees at the back of the van here. I used a fishing weight and a catapult to fire a wire about 20m up into the tree, the wire then goes from the shack here up into the tree and then back down in a slope. I left the rest of the wire on the reel so who knows what that does to the antenna. It seems to tune well on 80 and 160 with my small portable manual ATU.

Station Icom 7100 and portable  ATU MFJ 901B,

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Running just 20w into the end fed wire I was able to work M0UKD John, G7UVW Dave and M6RKE Ryan. We decided to use Hellscriber as its a fun “digital” mode, and quite easy to copy even under poor conditions. Its interesting how you can visualise the QSB and multipath on the screen.

Here is a screen shot decoding John M0UKD.

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1 Comment

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  1. Nice little setup Dave. Looks like you had AGC on super fast going by the noise in between letters 😀

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