12/09/2009 | WA4UF I headed for my now more or less customary location, my inlaws' back porch in Largo, FL. I had tried to limit what I took along, but I still ended up with a fair pile of stuff:

* Kenwood TS-430s HF transceiver

* MFJ-9406 6m transceiver

* Yaesu FT-100 HF/VHF transceiver (mobile unit, yanked from the car)

* MFJ-941 tuner

* half-built 2m portable Yagi

* 6m portable Yagi

* 40m wire dipole,fed with 300ohm twinlead

* 4:1 balun

* half-homebrew BuddiPole - commercial center and whips,homebrew arms

* homebrew choke balun for the BuddiPole

* 75AH deep cycle battery which turned out to be dead

* mast - 6 4' hunks of TV mast,guy ropes,tent pegs,hammer

* string and 1-1/4" socket to pull up the dipole into the trees

* plenty of coax and twinlead (but alas, NOT plenty of adapters...)

Saturday morning before start time was spent building a new 6el 2m Yagi, largely patterned after one W4RNL(sk) described in a QST article a while back. Once that was done (and some last minute running around accomplished to buy yet another deep cycle battery and some N-to-PL adapters for the LMR400 feeding the 2m antenna) I got everything set up and ready to go.

Operating the event was largely uneventful, right up until the time I discovered that the TS-430 was even MORE sensitive than the FT-100 to low supply voltage - soon as the battery dropped to about 12.2V, the 430 refused to transmit. So I grabbed the FT-100 out of the car, set it up in place of the 430, and kept right on going. On the Christmas list for this year - one of those MFJ boost regulators!

Now if only I could find the darned logsheets - they're lost in the chaos of my office/hamshack, hopefully not permanently! -- WA4UF