Can You Use The Yaesu ATAS Antenna For Portable Ham Radio?

we've got a great testimonial about ham radio helping during an emergency where should you actually aim your antenna trouble workking DX stations and using an ATS antenna for portable ham radio this time on mailbag Monday what's happening everyone Thanks for tuning in to ham radio tube my name is Mike kmrd if you have an amateur radio related question for me shoot me an email kmrd icloud.com I would love to hear from you we've got four great things to talk about today let's Dive Right In this first one uh this furer says hey just wanted to let you know we only had ham radio in the tornado area here in sidel Louisiana after a tornado passed around 10:00 a.m. I think my brother K5 SLT and I could not get through to our mom on the other side of town about 5 miles away I was stuck at home flooded in when we had a little break in the weather and the streets were still flooded my brother drove over there while talking on our cell phones he dropped right when we got into her neighborhood we then got on our club repeater which is under AR's net control he called out over the repeater that Mom was all good and lost power and no damage to the house I just wanted to share an emergency where Ham Radio came to the rescue when regular Communications go down that is fantastic and anyone watching who may not be licensed this alone is reason to get your technician license just the fair the bare entry into ham radio because you can do exactly what they did just get a handheld radio very inex you can get a bough Fang uv5r for $18 on Amazon and have emergency communications they were able to get into the uh Aries net and relay that information that Mom was okay thank you so much for sharing that that is an awesome story next we've got a great question about aiming your antenna this fer right so I'm trying to up my game and get some European contacts and I always thought I had to aim Direct directly east from Ohio the way uh on the map when I printed a map uh from the ns6 t.net SL asimuth wow that say that 10 times fast website it shows hitting England at 47 degrees a Northeast heading is this correct when orienting my antenna would you believe that it is so let's take a look at this website that he's talking about cuz this is really cool so here's my logging software this is rum log NG and I found a station who was spotted in Kuwait so here I am just north of Houston Texas and if we look at this Kuwait looks like they're pretty much do east of me but what about this line well that's where this aouth thing comes into play Let's Take a Look So he is in ll49 Ah that's his grid Square in Kuwait and if we type in ll49 ah here hit enter and I'm just going to put a max distance of 15,000 km we'll hit estimate imate location and then we'll hit create map and now we're presented with this I think it just pulls my location from my IP address maybe but it's got me right here in Texas and we can see well Kuwait is not due east of me if we zoom in we can see due east of me is like Angola uh Zambia Zimbabwe like all these kind of African stations Kuwait is way the heck up here at roughly oh let's see this is about 30° maybe 35° somewhere somewhere in this azimuthal direction well how does that work well because we know that the Earth is in fact a globe what's happening is my signal is actually going all the way over here hi Detroit hi all my family all the way hits green land there over England and then down through Europe and finally here to Kuwait so if I aimed my antenna due east I would actually be hitting these countries down here even though this looks like it's Southeast so going back to this map you being in Ohio we we'd have similar uh directions here but yes you actually would be pointing your antenna North going kind of over the world to Europe so you can see and you were saying 35° which is about right here's Ohio okay so somewhere in Ohio you'd be shooting this way and about 35° that's how it works so yeah and what an interesting and cool tool that we have from that n6 uh website there to find out where the heck you are and where those DX stations are and that's how you know where to aim your beam antenna and congratulations for having a beam antenna where humble guys like me only have a wire and we can't aim them at all so yep sounds like you're doing everything right and thanks so much for writing in next we've got another station about DX this Vier writes I live in an HOA and I'm sure everyone watching is sorry for you he says I'm trying to fly under the radar of all my neighbors I have four homemade antennas none of them visible from the street I have a 41 ft random length in a shed a 71 ft on the top rail of my wooden fence a center fed for 40 on the second rail of the fence and an nfed halfway for 80 on the top rail of the fence going the opposite direction as the 71t antenna but I'm not not able to work any DX do you have any suggestions that would work in an HOA that are not too high in price so not knowing the height of your fence and the height of your antennas I can only assume and we all know what they say about assuming but I'm going to do it anyway I doubt your fence is very tall so it sounds to me even if your fence was like 20 ft up in the air it sounds to me like all of your antennas are fairly low to the ground meaning uh you're going to have a pretty high takeoff angle so you probably have really great envas or near vertical incident skywave propagation where you're getting stations that are closer into you but you're not hearing anything farther out and all that has to do with the takeoff angle of the antenna ideally antennas want to be a half wavelength above the ground for whatever band or frequency you're using and I I doubt especially on 80 M you'd have to have your antenna 40 m up in the air to get that halfwave which isn't really practical and even with a 40 m antenna ideally you'd want it to be 20 m above the ground which is 60 some OD feet so probably not ideal for an HOA but a good solution and I talk about this antenna all the time I'm going to talk about two uh one more than the other some kind of vertical antenna those are generally going to give you a lower takeoff angle so your your your signal is going to basically go out it let's just say 5° cuz that's what Callum uses bounce off the atmosphere Somewhere over the ocean and then refract back down to those DX stations and vice versa when they're transmitting they're going to hopefully ref refract at a lower takeoff angle and come back down to use so the first antenna that comes to mind is The Wolf of recoil Silver Bullet 1000 this is actually the Platinum version that can handle a little more power depending on what you're using I think this is rated for like 200 WTS sideband 100 Watts digital or a DX Commander antenna now the DX Commander you're going to have to take up and and put down uh temporarily because it's 30 some odd feet tall and I'm pretty sure your neighbors would start poking around saying what the heck is that but you could just lay it on the grass and put it up when you want to use it the benefit is that's a multi-band resin and antenna and you don't need to do any tuning you would just have to disconnect the ground radials and lay it down somewhere when you were done the Wolf River coils you're going to have to go outside every time you want to change bands because this little collar here this one goes all the way from 80 m all the way up to 10 m you can get six on this but you really don't need the coil to get six and I would recommend this is the Wolf River coils uh 17t whip it's actually a little bit longer than 17 ft I forget um the actual length but just a touch longer than 17 ft so this just screws into here and if you just buy this as a package you might want to peace meal it out though just get the the Silver Bullet 1000 or the Silver Bullet Platinum uh for 80 through 10 this 17t whip you can buy separately from Wolf River coils and the reason I suggest this is because it's 17 ft long the more radiating element in the air the better but it's still only 17 ft and you can get either a tripod with this or I believe wol of coils now sells a steak that you can stick in the ground and then you can put out a few ground radials and you're in business so I would rock some kind of vertical again the DX Commander the DX Commander is probably not going to be as practical for you because it is taller it's not quite as stealth for your application uh but the benefit is you would just put it up and you can change bands whatever uh the DX Commander Classic or the uh the 12 meter version you can you can make all of these resonant on 80 M all the way up through like 10 m or 6 m whatever you want you can make whatever whatever bands you want for the antennas they're fantastic think of vertical fan dipole that's really all it is and again The Wolf of Rec coils uh is going to be less noticeable because it's not going to be as tall it's you know this is probably say this is 18 in and then another 17 ft here so 20 ft of stuff uh vertically uh is probably not going to be noticeable by your neighbors and even if it is it's temporary and you can go tell your neighbors to suck it so uh that would be my advice I'm sure in the comments hopefully people will leave other suggestions that are uh good as well and maybe something that I didn't even think about but yeah try a vertical heck even make something string a wire vertically in the air and throw some radials on it just to to try it but uh the wol for recoils is going to be the cheapest you're probably going to be uh easily under $200 probably closer to 1501 175 for that where a DX Commander you're going to be probably in the in the $4 to $500 range with shipping and all that so hopefully that answers your question and hopefully you can get a solution out there to work that DX cuz boy is working DX fun so thanks for writing in I appreciate it and finally we have a question about the Yu atass one of my absolute favorite antennas this viewer writes being a 30-year no code Tech heck yes shout out to the no code ham radio operators I am finally upgrading my license to General and I'm retiring early in a year and a half I had a question about antennas I want to know if an atos could be used on an extendable Mast attached to my ladder on my motor home if a grounding wire was attached from the mounting plate to my frame of the motor home I haven't bought an HF rig yet but I'm considering an 891 or a 991 well the 891 versus 991 that's up to you I'm not a huge fan of the 991 so I'd go 891 but you do you but let's take a look at this antenna now this is going to be funny because I've just kind of PC Meed some parts together to kind of hopefully illustrate the point I only took about 5 minutes doing this but hopefully this should be enough of a demonstration to show you that yes you can do this so let's hop outside and take a look at what I've done okay so here's what I did I kind of just grabbed some parts that I had on hand cuz I don't think I have exactly what you're using but I've just got this 4ft military Mast here obviously you can see the ATS on it and that's mounted on this bracket here that's called the Skyhook and I've got three Bunches of five 2 and 1/2 meter radials bolted to it I actually used a Wolf River coils leg to uh bolt that down and then the ATS is secured with uh one of these uh bulkhead so239 mounts and then I've got that just guide off got some uh messian Pony poolex 7 and then that's going over here into the body of the 891 plugged in and then that's plugged into my biggeek battery box now you will need to play around with your ground radials or how you you connect the ground to your Caravan uh for example like 6 M on here with this setup doesn't really tune very well I I got like a 3:1 s SWR but let's take a look at 10 m tuned up just fine let's go to 12 M and you can see the the antenna's going up tuning no problem 15 M works great 17 m fantastic that might be a little high yeah about a two to one there so again grounding I could put more radials on here and probably make it a little better there's 20 M got a really good match there 30 m done and done that looked a little high too and 40 m probably need a little more radials for this but it's still Works done and done so that was probably like a 1.8 to one there so obviously the atos really does want a good ground system if I put more radials on here I'm sure it would be even better hooking it up to uh a big Caravan like you have make sure everything's grounded or just put a bunch of radials on it uh maybe some uh like 333t radials or something you'll have to experiment a little bit but it absolutely works and it's stupid easy to use I love the ATS so hopefully that answers your question question and that's it for today guys if you have amateur radio related questions for me shoot me an email k8mrd icloud.com I'd love to hear from you my name is Mike kmrd thanks so much for watching another episode of ham radio tube 73

Channel: Ham Radio Tube

Views: 12,353

Keywords: DX Commander Expedition, DX Commander, Parks on the Air, Ham Radio Antenna, Bioenno, Lithium Iron Phosphate, LiFePO4, Antenna Analyzer, ham radio, amateur radio, Anderson Power Pole, Ham radio battery, Portable radio power, QRP RADIO, Yaesu, Baofeng, K8MRD, POTA, parks on the air activation, parks on the air ham radio, RigExpert, k8mrd radio stuff, packtenna mini, Big Geek, Big Geek Battery Box, Antenna Tuner, Wolf River Coils

Id: oT3FaSVCFq8

Length: 14min 44sec (884 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024