July 2012 EI8GQB HF IARU and IOTA CONTEST ACTIVITY with GREEN ENERGY

10/04/2012 To dimension wind and solar installations, only monthly average data are available. In the case of a short period of operation (10 days), this information is not precise enough. I decided to develop a sun/wind energy production forecast model based on detailled weather forecast like hourly average wind speed for the wind generator and hourly clouds cover for the solar generator, The data can be found on www.Windguru.cz. I expect to measure a real installation and challenge the model as a few information are available about the clouds effect on solar panel power production. At the same time, the installation will supply my everyday energy needs and amateur radio contest activities during whole month of July 2012.

FORECAST MODEL INPUT DATA:

SOLAR PANEL NOMINAL CURRENT :10 A

SOLAR REGULATOR EFFICIENCY :85 % (Solar regulators have 15% losses)

WIND PERFORMANCE TABLE (Table with Ah versus wind speed, this is depending on the wind generator)

SOLAR RADIATION TABLE (Table with solar radiation variation due to the season and earth position)

HOURLY CONSUMPTION (Table with Ah usage, I calculated 14 Ah to supply SO2R contest operation)

BATTERY CAPACITY :475 Ah (2 batteries 200 Ah + 1*75 Ah)

BATTERY EMPTY CYCLE :60 % (batteries can never produce their full capacity, only 60%)

BATTERY MAX RESERVE :285 Ah (real battery capacity)

CONTEST ACTIVITY DAILY LOAD : 336 Ah, installation must be able to supply 336-285 = 51 Ah per day minimum.

 

MODEL DESCRIPTION:

COMMENTS:

Solar panel current starts 1H30 AFTER sunrise and stops 1H30 BEFORE sunset.

Solar panel current is MAX for clear sky and 10% for 100% clouds covered.

March 2012 EI8GQB CQ WPX SSB CONTEST FETHARD IRELAND

CLAIMED SCORE: 2.400.000 POINTS/ 1664 QSO/ 788 PREFIXES. Result: Claimed

26/03/2012 See the results above, I should be in the top 10 europe for sure, I got nice surprises during this contest, amongst the stations who answered to my calls, there was T6MO on 10m (Afghanistan), and the second was XU7BAN (Kampuchea) on 20m but he was lost in the contest jungle. and never gave me a report/serial number, therefore not in my log. Was he a pirate or not use to contest ???. 2.4 millions points realised this year and 0.17 millions points improvement from last year. Regarding contacts and multipliers : from 1324 to 1664 QSOs and from 674 to 788. I expected to obtain a better points score, the reason comes from the difficulty to find a free calling frequency on 20m and 15m in order to work enough North American stations with 3 points instead of one for europe and very often a new prefix multiplier. It was really hard to race against killowatts/big gun antenna stations to run a frequency. I therefore decided to searchon 10m bands for south american stations, I succeed to contact more than 100 of them but not enough incomparison with north american potential.

I want to thank all of you who followed me on this blog and subscribed or sent comments on ON4EI's You Tube channel. Many thanks also to YO3CZW,S50A,RW1CW, RL6M and RM5D operators who creates the challenge and motivates me to do better each time in order to reach their results and experience. I will come back next year with new learning as I still did not reach my maximum of competences. See you this summer in July for the IARU World Championship as HQ (Headquarter) station for Ireland, I hope, and during IOTA (Island On The Air) contest where I will try to beat the world record in single operator fixed island low power all band unassisted category .

24/03/2012 PM 22:00; I stopped operation according to my planning at 21:30. 22:00 hours without sleeping, I am tired, I realised my best result ever made. I reached 1000 QSO and 1 millions points in 20:30 of activity, this represents in average, 1 contact every 1 minutes 13 seconds. A new interesting objective for the future would be above 1 QSO per minute. The bands are currently wide open from japan to north america, I cannot stay more awake, my eyes are closing.

24/03/2012 PM 15:00; A status in the middle of the contest. I take the opportunity to update the blog, as when I wanted to refill the power generator (working), some petrol leaked on the generator. I decided immediatelly to stop it. I cleaned it and when I wanted to restart it, the rope used to launch the motor, stayed in my hand. I had to open the system and replace the broken rope. It took me 25 minutes and I decided to stop 1 hour to eat and update the blog. It is now 15:31 UTC and I already made 720 contacts (my best result ever). I am on the way to my objective if no more problems occur. The wind blowed this morning up to 50 Kph gust and all the antenna resisted well.

23/03/2012 Last hours before the begining of the contest, adrenaline increases, a lot of traffic already on the bands and the 10 meters band is wide open, good sign for tomorrow. Today I made maintenance : refill campervan water tank, empty toilets, prepare the petrol for the power generator and food for 2 days, I will go to sleep around 17:00 UTC and be ready for 00:00 UTC. See you during the contest.

22/03/2012 I finalized today the antenna park, you can see on the new video below the complete installation ready for the contest.

21/03/2012 Yesteray, I spent the day to rebuilt the second spiderbeam, it was well broken. The antenna is now at 3m high and ready to be erected at 12m. I had also a problem with one of the 2 relays I expected to use for the bidiretional switching of the 40m 3 elements. As I am in the middle of the fields, I cannot place it. I give up, but the 3 elements will be directed to Europe during the contest (almost 20 dB stronger than the vertical 5/8 lambda). The difference with the vertical antenna in the North American direction is not so strong sometimes no difference sometimes just one S meter point 6db (4 times the signal). This is due to the low height (11m) of the inverted V wirebeam that as less gain on low angle (longer distance than europe).

19/03/2012 Second day of antenna installation, today it was the hardest one, the erection of the 15m mast supporting the main spiderbeam was physically vey hard. At the end of the day, almost all antenna have been raised, in the following days I will rebuilt the last and second spiderbeam broken during last contest. Bernard (EI4II) visited me today with his son Alex, they helped me to rebuilt a new 4 arms support for the second Spiderbeam, you can see on the picure below, Alex holding the broken support. In the background the first Spiderbeam under construction, the verical antenna raised and farer, some white poles supporting the beverage antenna. I made a lot of QSO today, a nice pile-up from europe with signals up to 35 dB over S9 and peaking up to 3-4 QSO per minutes. It is a real pleasure to operate the 3 elements 40m inverted V wirebeam.

18/03/2012 Well arrived in Ireland, I spent the first nightin the campervanamongst boxes, antennas and masts. I will be checking the vertical antenna this evenning around 19:00 PM on 40m.

16/03/2012I leave Belgium tomorrow morning, in Ireland the weather forecast is the best I can hope. No wind, no rain, a beautifull clear sky is forecasted during the week. I think this week will be another wonderfull experience. Yes !!. Bernard EI4II , my Saltee EJ4II expedition fellow (see blog athttp://www.qrz.com/db/ej4ii), will visit me during the week, we are also planning in July, another experience together during the HF worldchampionship to operate IRTS HQ station EI0HQ.

09/03/2012 One week left and the Spiderbeam spare parts to replace broken fibber glass tubes from last october contest have been delivered in Ireland.

11/02/2012 I am starting the preparation of the WPX 2012 expedition. During winter, I made another design of 40M 3 elements wirebeam direction switching system.I also analysed the logs of the Top 10 european stations (WPX 2011), my objective is to understand when and on which band they operates and when they sleep. Optimizing my sleeping period during low traffic period is one of my objectives as single operator are only allowed to operate 36 hours on 48 hours. See below the details of those two new improvements.

New mechanical design 40m 3 elements wirebeam 180° remote direction switching

The switching system allows instant 180° direction change between 100° East (Europe-Asia) and 280° West (North-Central America). I used in the first design (see blog October 2011 CQ WW DX) a box with an inductor placed at the top of the 12m fibber glass masts, but it is too heavy regarding the diameter dimension of the last section mast. In case of wind there is a risk to break it. I decided to use, in this new version, a loop of wire 2 times 1.1 m long and spaced by 10cm. A small relay switches between a short cut (act as director) and the wire loop (act as reflector).It is a chance to operate from Ireland as I can cover the major contests areas with only2 directions. If the signals come from North and South, I will use my 5/8 lambda vertical on 40m as usual.

I compared the patterns of the different antennas used during contests, the 3 elements wirebeam is performing better on all the interesting takeoff angles, additionnaly the noise is much lower due to the directional pattern. Experienced during the CQ DX SSB 2011 contest, to F/B allowed to shut down europe signals and work north amercian station with signal up to S9+20dB. Beaming europe, some signals went up to S9+40dB !

Antenna performance

Calculated with 4NEC2 antenna modeling software, the maximum forward gain reaches 9.75dBi @40° elevation and the front to back ratio variates from 12dB to higher than 30 dB on all the 40M SSB band part.

The 4NEC2 new "loop" design is available here :https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-lK5cwv2216YU9ESGt1VnFSZldvVncwNldvbnZWdwthe number of segment is high, as I optimized it, To compute quicker the frequency sweep, you must reduce the segment number of the main elements. This is the final desing (I hope) after almost a year of optimization.

I also calculated the length variation of the different elements to tune, this helps a lot during the tuning of the antenna.

WPX 2011 Results Analysis

Based on the WPX 2011 TOP10 european station results (SO AB LP Unassisted), I made some diagrams to better understand their contest strategies. Here are the results and my comments to build my contest plan.

Band distribution analysis and location of Top10 Europe stations

The map to the left show that the majority of TOP10 stations are located 1000 to 2000 Km far fromthe center of europe where the population density is the highest, this corresponds to the first area where signals goes down to the earth after a first reflexion on the ionospheric layer. The signals are therefore very strong same with 100W output power.In the WPX contest, as mutlipliers are the callsign prefixes (ex: ON4, ON5, ON6 are 3 differents prefixes for belgium, or the same for Ireland EI4,EI5,EI6),every participant is almost a multiplier. You can see in the results table, amongst 2 contacts (QSOs), one is amultiplier(WPX). Targeting mass contact number which means using in priority the most used bands15,20,40m,where Ham radio can easily deploy antennas is a very good choice.

You see that YO3CZW has the best QSO distribution between 40,20,15m bands. If you look at his antenna (this linkYO3CZW), you understand that he operates very well, with his combined antenna (2 element 40m/3 elements 20m and 3 elements 15m). But the most important antenna park amongst TOP10 euopre is own by S50A (this link S50A) and you will easily understand that my temporary portable antenna park is very humble.

Band diagram 10 minutes periods

To define my operation strategy, I have build a 10 minutes trafic band distribution based on the top 10 european station logs. We clearly see 2 low periods of trafic, the first from 21:30 to 06:30 and the second at the end of the contest starting at 21:00. As mono operator, we are allowed to operate maximum 36h on 48h, I decided to plan my sleeping period around the first period and stop early at 21:00. But I will continue the fun during the last 3 hours of the contest with EI/ON4EI as checklog. I will spend several days to set up the antenna park and I need a good return on this effort. Based on this graph, I have also defined my RUN band and my SEARCH band planning.

October 2011 EI8GQB CQ WW DX SSB CONTEST FETHARD IRELAND

CLAIMED SCORE: 1.223.376 POINTS/ 1513 QSO/ 88 ZONES / 326 COUNTRIES.

Antenna farm setup after 5 days of work.

Last Update 31/10/2011

It is now 1.30 AM, 1h30 after the end of the 48 hours contest, I cannot sleep and I take the opportunity to update the blog. I drinked too much orange juice, cofee and red bull, I haven't sleep since 20 hours. I am very satisfied about the result desipite the weather conditions I have experienced this year. 4 hours before the begining of the contest, a big big storm happened, like the one experienced on the sunday (gust up to 100 kph), but the weather forecast under estimated the wind, they said said only 60 kph but it was above the forcasted value and to my opinion nearby 100 kph. Conclusion, what I expected happened. If you want to see how broken Spiderbeam antennas look, I give you 2 for the price of 1.See below .

Spiderbeam antennas broken 4 hours before the contest

On the saterday morning and thanks to my friend Peter, I rebuilt one antenna with spare parts in order to be able to operate on the higher bands. I lost almost 4 hours of operation ( minimum 120 contacts), the wind and the rain were heavy and we erected again the mast with success but at 10m instead of 15m high. Despite this major problem, I have increased my results by 20% accroding to last year, I reached 1.2 millions points and 1500 contacts. The propagation was the best since 10 years with nice contacts with Hawai, New Zeland, and more than 800 contacts with the american continent.

27/10/2011 After almost 40 hours of hard work in the fields, I am almost ready for the contest, the antenna farm is now ready, as expected according to my design. I worked during 5 days very hard to setup all the 5 antennas with help of my local friends Peter, I thank him very much as without him this would never be possible. I would likealso to thank Gabriel, the owner of the field. A phone call and the fields are mine, with a lot of cattle dung, I think this give chance when you walk on it, therefore I should play lotto when I come back to the civilisation. Anyway, if I do not win I hope to score in the top 15 europe for the cq ww dx ssb contest with a minimumof 1500 contacts during the 48 hours. I also added a new video of the antenna farm and you can see that I am very close to the 3D animation. See on the blog or on Youtube ON4EI's channel. The 3 elements wirebeam is working as expected giving more than 3 S meter points regarding the 5/8 lambda vertical, I had some nice pile up with europe and nice chat with north american stations. The remote system at the top of the mast to reverse the direction of the antenna cannot be used as the fibber glass poles cannot support correctly the weight of the boxes in case of wind, I decided to change the mechanical design by adding a piece of wire to each parasitic elements tunned for director. With this, I add wire to make a reflector.

25/10/2011 The antenna park is built at 80%, I still need to build the second Spiderbeam antenna. Since Sunday I have worked 26 hours outside in the fields, eating only in the morning and in the evening without any pause and walking all the time in thecow dung and mud.The 3 elements wirebeam 40m has been erected and tunned perfectly. It gives outsanding signals, 10 to 20dB over the vertical 5/8 lambda 18m high with toploading. I also added a video of the inside of the campervan.See on Youtube ON4EI's channel.

24/10/2011 See my video blog on Youtube and select ON4EI's channel.

23/10/2011 I am well arrived in Ireland, the campervan is loaded with my 350 kg of equipment, the second Spiderbeam has been delivered and is ready to be built. But there is a bad news and a good news. The bad one is the heavy rain and gust up to 90 km/h today for starting the antenna setup, the good one is the weather improvement for the following days as you can see on the picture below.

I arrived on Benneshill at 11:00 AM and started to build the vertical, at 15:40 PM just after I raised it and installed the 32 radials, I had to lie it on the ground, the wind was so strong that I decided not to be QRV this evening. I will make some preparation and soldering inside the campervan. It is moving now like a boat.

20/10/2011 Since 1 year I am trying to improve my 40 m antenna system that consists of a 5/8 lambda vertical 18m high with top loading.

In October 2010, I tried the spitfire concept ( see link here) . I never reached the expected front to back result, additionaly, I also broken the fibber glass mast due to heavy wind gusts up to 80 km/h. This for the second time after October 2009.

In July 2011, I tried a 3 elements vertical array with the same frustrating results. I am looking for some more forward gain (I am only using 100W) but certainly a better front to back ratio to shut down Europe signals when I am working North America during the contest.

This time, after 2 unsuccessful results, I will put all my energy to fine tune the 3 elements 40 m inverted V beam.

The 2 switching boxes with the 2.3 µH inductors including relays have been built (see picture and design below) and are ready for testing.

Regarding the weather for the week, it is not the best, very windy and rainy and I am already psychologically prepared to break antennas as weather forecast during the week plansgusts up to 90 km/h.

The campervan is now booked and for my stay in Ireland, I am travelling now with :http://www.donegalmotorhomes.com/

Every day I check the 2 following websites :

Weather forecast :http://www.windguru.cz/fr/index.php?sc=47761

Sun activity :http://www.solarham.com/

ANTENNA SET UP

I have also listed the major tasks for the week:

-Install the 18m vertical antenna with new top loading for 80-160m

-Install old spiderbeam 20-15-10m (SEARCH antenna) on a new 15m high aluminium mast with rotator at the base.

4NEC2 antenna design file is available here :https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B-lK5cwv2216NjI5NmEzNDEtMTI0Ny00OTE0LWEyNmUtMzk2MDg1ZWMzNTg3&hl=en

The Very Last update31/07/2011 :

The contest just finished 5 minutes ago and I am very tired as I did not sleep at all. The begining was hard to manage SO2R and fortunatelly good moment in the early evening on 40m to UK, but the propagation I experienced during the week before to North America on 20m never happened and instead central america/caribbean was open almost all the night but with poor activity from this area. During the night, I really struggle against the sleep and on the sunday morning, after a lot of UK stations worked, again on 40m and 2 hours before the end of the contest, a nice 10m opening happened.This helped me to stay awake and add a lot of new island multipliers as well as 15 points.The opening started from scandinavia and then moved to DL,SP,OK and finished in the center of europe, this happened also in 2009, where I made my highest number of contact ever made with EI/ON4EI and won the contest in my category with 1020 QSO/118 MULT/ 661.272 POINTS.

Before the contest

29/07/2011 This morning between 01:00 and 03:00 UTC, I again experienced a nice pile up from North America with the 10 elements wirebeam reaching easily the 1 qso per minutes for more than 100 contacts

28/07/2011 First, let me express my surprise and contentement to all of you who are following my expedition via this blog, since the begining more than 1500 visits !!!!. I will continue to update it regularly but with less energy during the contest.

27/07/2011 PM It started to rain at 14:00 UTC when I was just tuning the vertical driven element of the vertical array. The height was not enough to reach resonnance due to bend of the support rope, I had to add T shape top loading suspended in the middle of the 2 poles supporting the 2 parasitics elements. What I underestimate is the wind, it created an offset of driven element regarding the parasitic elements alignement.

Itook a picture of the "schack", see below. It looks like my desk at home (private joke for my wife Virginia ;-). According to rain radar www.meteox.com , it will rain during an hour or so. While I am updating the blog I am listening to 28MHz band with S9 signals from Norway, Germany and Italy, good sign for the contest propagation conditions. For me the IOTA's cherry on the cake is the 10 m opening happening on the sunday morning.

27/07/2011 Today, wake up late again, not only because of the work, but mainly because I spent a part of the night on the air.

26/07/2011 Yesterday was another great day, not regarding the weather but regarding the hard work done.

24/07/2011 After two full days of work the antenna park is installed. See the picture below

22/07/2011 Well arrived in Ireland, I am spending the evening with the in laws in Fethard/Clonmel/Tipperary county. The weather forecast are wonderfull, very low rain and ideally, no wind for the week, perfect conditions for HAM radio activities and experimentation in the fields. My new equipement has been delivered from Spiderbeam and Wimo, mainly 2 * 12mfibber glass masts for the vertical array and 2 aluminium masts 12 and 15m high for the 10 elements wirebeam. Tomorrow morning, I will start the station installation around 10:30 on Benneshill/Fethard area.

NEW ANTENNAS EXPERIMENTATION:

10 elements 20m inverted V antenna

14.4 dBI gain with 40° 3dB beamwidth,manually bi-directionnal East 100°-West 280°.

I already builtsuch an antenna but with no mechanical optimisation, see ON4EI WireBeam

http://www.uba.be/sites/default/files/uploads/tech/cqqso0907_on4ei_draadbeam.pdf(French and Dutch black & white version).

http://www.on7wr.be/Gigazette/ON4EI/ON4EI_Wirebeam.pdf(French only color version).

This year, I made a new optimised design with lighter components (Wires and support rope). (max 1Kg !!)

Blue pattern : 10 elements inverte V (20m band).

Red pattern : 3 elements Spiderbeam (20m band).

IOTA CONTEST OBJECTIVE

25/03/2011 Morning. 6th sunny day !! without rain and wind, yesterday evening I worked a lot of North Amercian stations on 20M and 40M with small pile-ups, the signal where well over S9. The active sunspots are coming back to visibility of the earth and we should expect for the contest very propagation conditions that we never had since several years !!! Today, planned activities are rest, sleep and some maintenance, like empty the campervan toilets, refill water tank and petrol for the power generator. See you during the contest. I will update next week my contests results.

23/03/2011 Evening. Again another great sunny day, I worked on the beverage antenna. The system is now working well with a front to back ratio of 3S points (around 18dB). The station is now fully ready. I made this morning nice qso's with Japan and Australia, the best one with John G8SEQ/VK2 with only 5W !!! It is clear the sun is weaking up. See below his comments I received via mail.

"Hi Olivier, Just got your details from qrz.com. I can confirm our qsl of today at about 09:10 to 09:20 Z and will send you a special qsl card to your Irish address when I get back to England in two weeks time, after I have designed and printed some! This is my best Dx EVER using QRP 5 watts. Distance 10759 miles or 17314 km Antenna at my end is an ESSEQUE colinear fed dipole, cut for 20m band ( see www.g8seq.com for details ), strung between a gum tree and a gazebo. It is stretched over a swimming pool which contains salt water which just happens to be about half wave long at 20m, so giving me some ground gain. I deliberately changed its orientation to put a better signal into Europe having achieved good success working Japan yesterday ( 5000 miles). In contrast to you, it took me all of 10 mins to erect my antenna and get on the air. Rig is FT-817 barefoot operating from 12 v 10 AHr Lion battery. Antenna height about 10 msloping down to 2m at rig end. I'll send photos if you are interested.

BTW I'm drinking my favorite Whiskey - Jameson's Irish Whiskey to celebrate and have also had a Guinness brewed in Dublin ( The REAL stuff imported into Australia )

What antenna & what power were you using to work me? You were 58 all through the QSO with no fading at all.

I don't think I sent you my exact QTH via radio. It is Albury NSW Australia QF33lw.

de John G8SEQ/VK2, Albury."

22/03/2011 Evening. I spend the all day in tee-shirt. Today I had a dream, I was in EA8 not EI8, around 17°c today and it was a real pleasure to build the beverage. I also took a shower (the first since sunday.).
I made a few contacts but not so radio active. Very tired I will sleep early and weak up during the night to check the low band propagation.

21/03/2011 Evening. Today, Peter my local friend came to help me to raise the vertical and the spiderbeam beam, both are now operational. I checked this evening the vertical antenna and got a small pile-up with one QSO per minute, not so bad with 100W, the vertical gave booming signals. After this full hard work day, I prepared a kind of belgian national meal: salad, steak and french (I mean belgian) frites and french red wine (nothing to say).
At the time I am writing this report, I am listening to the 40m band, brazilian as well as north american stations are well over S9, like local stations. Tomorrow, I will install the beverage antenna and start my planned experimentation.

20/03/2011PM A change in the planning, the field where I am regularly operating EI8GQB is full of cattles(cows) and I had to move to the side of the hill, south is blocked by the hill but I still have very good view 330° instead of 360°. I have installed the power generator and a cross dipole for 40m and 80m. I made 10 qso today to check the installation with good report,I also broken the NP4A pile up at the second call on 80m. I am very tired, I will go early to sleep as Istart tomorrow with the first sun light to raise the vertical and the spiderbeam. Weather was above expectations and I am suffering from sun burn. I forgot my sunglasses (am I in Ireland ??). See the weather forecast nearest spot : http://www.windguru.cz/int/index.php?sc=47760I never had such beautifull forecast.

20/03/2011AM Arrival near Fethard with the campervan. I should be around 1 PM on the hill and start the low band antenna installation. I expect to start operation this evening on 40m. The weather will be the best as I can expect, no rain an no wind for the week.

19/03/2011 Well arrived in Ireland.

18/03/2011 Welcome on my blog, I will spendone week on top of Benneshill alone in a campervan from March 20th to 27th 2011.