Desperately seeking for time today to get my portable gear and get out for 4 hours.....well I can only dream of a RaDAR participation. But to get the feeling I put everything in the bag. FT-817, digimodem, MP-1 antenna, tripod, 7Ah battery, piece of RG58/U coax, RaDAR logsheets and a pencil. 8,3Kg in total. I travel all the way to the back of our garden and set it up in a hurry. Tuning the antenna after 5 minutes, didn't get a good SWR....5 minutes later I discovered I forgot to connect the radials. Too much hurry. It always amazes me how well the MP-1 receives. I had several stations on 20m with S9+, one of them was 4X6TT. I worked LZ284SKD without any problem.
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Now, I wanted to see if I could make any digi contact. I was planning to do some JT65 mode and for that you need to sync the time. To do that I made a portable WiFi hotspot with my phone so I had a connection with internet. That worked fine. Receive did very well but I couldn't get the whole setup to transmit my signal. Whatever I tried the radio did not switch to transmit. So, no further contacts. I was running out of time as it already started to get dark. So I quickly packed my gear and got it back in the shack were I tried and tested the whole digi setup again. It worked well this time so I guess I had a bad case of RFI into the modem.
I was actually glad I didn't pack for a real RaDAR challenge and just did this small experiment in the garden to get the feel of it. I really like the idea but to be successful you need some good preparation.
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What I learned: Test the equipment in the field and not at the base station, I really need some kind of bracket or bag for my radio as I couldn't place it anywhere, don't use RG58 cable I had bad experiences with it in the past and had it again this time, use a light tablet instead of a laptop or get a small laptop.
The biggest problem I had with the laptop is that I could barely read the screen. I know a tablet does a lot better and has power enough for digimode.
Well, it will take some more testing and experience before I can participate in a RaDAR challenge for real. However the half hour I spend to get the feeling of it was very useful.
What I learned: Test the equipment in the field and not at the base station, I really need some kind of bracket or bag for my radio as I couldn't place it anywhere, don't use RG58 cable I had bad experiences with it in the past and had it again this time, use a light tablet instead of a laptop or get a small laptop.