by Mike, N4GU

Dennis Sweeney, WA4LPR, and I took off from Blacksburg Thursday, April 2, headed down to Atlanta to attend the 2nd Annual Southeastern VHF Conference.  I had never been to a VHF conference before and didn't know what to expect.  My primary motivation for going was to present a talk on my Stub-Loaded Helical antennas at the conference and to visit some of my friends from the Fourlanders VHF/UHF Contest Team many of whom live in the Atlanta area.

We left Blacksburg in the late morning, timing it so that we would reach Statesville, NC in time for lunch at our favorite BBQ spot - Carolina BBQ!  Friends, if you ever find yourself rolling down I-77 about 40 miles north of Charlotte, make the short trip off the interstate to taste some of the best BBQ ever.  Wonderful food, friendly people and if you're lucky the electric train will be running around the ceiling.  Eating at Carolina BBQ is half the reason I go to the Charlotte and Shelby hamfests anymore.

We arrived in Atlanta in time to participate in every urban center's favorite activity - rush hour.  Rush hour traffic is bad enough by itself, but when you have almost no idea where you are going, it gets to be real fun.  Well, we arrived at the conference hotel without any major accidents or mistakes.

Friday morning the conference sessions started with a presentation on the Fourlanders' September 1997 contest effort.  It consisted mostly of the pictures taken from my webpage that Jim, W4KXY, had transformed into overheads. Although not as good as 35mm shots, I thought they came out quite respectable.  The conference consisted of many interesting presentations.  There were a couple of talks by Ed Hare, W1RFI, from the ARRL including one on the new RF exposure rules we all have to adhere to.  For the power hungry among us, there was a great talk by Dick Hanson, K5AND, on a amplifier for six meters he built using a pair of 3CX800 tubes.  Dick builds beautiful equipment that looks as good as it works.

Dennis and I teamed up with Paul Wade, N1BWT, and Matt Reilly, KB1VC, who had come from Massachusetts for the conference, and went out for an early dinner.  Paul was the guest speaker for the banquet Saturday night.  He is a very prolific microwave experimenter and writer (check just about any ARRL publication) and is well known in the microwave/VHF community.  Matt is a Tech alumni and past president of VTARA.  He was a senior and VTARA president in 1981 when I arrived here as a freshman.  Our paths have almost crossed over the years as a result of VHF contesting but we had not actually met until this weekend.

As we were leaving for dinner, we ran into an old friend from grad school, Dave Shively, AF4HH, who now lives in the Atlanta area.  Dave did his masters here in the Satcom group.  He later went to University of Arizona to get his PhD and now works for Hitachi.  The five of us went out to dinner and then returned to the hotel lounge for a general BS session until late in the night.  We were entertained (?) by the lounge's country and western Karioke night, whose performers included our waitress.

Earlier in the evening there was an informal swapfest in one of the hotel meeting rooms.  There were 900 MHz trunk radios for sell as well as various bits and pieces of waveguide and associated devices.  I picked up an old Midland 222 MHz crystal controlled FM rig for use in contesting.  I'll either use it to monitor the FM calling frequency or loan it to a rover station to give them an extra band.

Saturday morning I presented my talk on the Stub Loaded Helical antennas I've been working on and received a very favorable reception.  There was a 15 minute break in the program after my talk and I spent the entire time talking to the crowd as they all came up for a closer look and to ask more questions.

Saturday afternoon, there was a great talk by Jim McMasters, KM5PO/KD5BUR, on high speed cw meteor scatter (HSCW MS) operation.  Jim is the author of the cover story in the April QST on the same topic.  The European amateur community has been doing this for decades but here in North America, we're just getting started.  The current interest in NA is due to the availability of computer tools to make this operation automated.  HSCW MS operators send cw at 2000-8000 lpm - letters per minute (thats 400 - 1600 wpm) to take advantage of very short meteor bursts, often much less than a second.  The audio is captured with a sound card and then slowed down so that the operator can copy the cw at a reasonable rate (20-40 wpm).  Using this technique, rather modest stations (single yagi, 100-150W) can make QSO on 2m from 600 to 1000 miles away.  This type of operating is very new here in NA but growing rapidly.

Saturday night at the banquet, Paul Wade, N1BWT, entertained us with slides of 10 GHz operation in New England and encouraged us to get active on this band.  Besides line-of-sight paths, 10 GHz offers some very interesting propagation "opportunities".  Paul has worked rain scatter by pointing his antenna straight up through a skylight in his house and worked stations 35 miles away - horizontally!  They've even detected signals that were propagated by bouncing off a tornado!

After, the dinner they gave away door prizes.  Boy, what nice prizes!  They included a Bird wattmeter with slug, a pair of 3CX800 tubes, VHF yagis from M2, Hygain, and Cushcraft, various microwave kits and components, and hardline transmission line.  Dennis made out by snagging a 100' roll of Andrews 1/2" hardline with connectors.  I got an ARRL microwave projects book and a SAM callsign database CD.  There were enough door prizes that everybody went away with at least two.

That evening I went out in the parking lot at the motel where Jim, KM5PO/KD5BUR, had set up a portable 2m HSCW MS station by his car.  Unfortunately there were some local noise sources that made reception of the meteor bursts difficult.  Reports being relayed back over the Internet indicated that he was being heard quite well.  While I was there we only heard one small ping and did not complete any skeds.  The next morning he had better success on a couple of skeds.

In two very short days I met a lot of really nice people and learned quite a lot.  The energy and excitement created by being around a group of enthusiastic, active amateurs is very contagious.  Paul and Matt have us thinking about giving 10 GHz SSB/CW a real try as there is a new transverter for this band due out this summer (designed in part by Paul).  I'm very interested in HSCW MS since I have almost everything I need to do it already ( I was already planning on adding 6m and 2m to my crank-up mast when it comes down this spring for maintance).  Several folks expressed an interest in building one of my Stub Loaded Helices and experimenting with them and it was suggested I present the paper at the AMSAT Symposium.  I'm working on plans to build SLHs for J, L, and S bands as a demo.  Whew!  If only I time to do it all.  Although much smaller, in many ways this conference was as invigorating as Dayton.  Hey! THAT'S only a month and a half away!
 

Many of the pictures linked on this page were shamelessly stolen from Johnny Wolfe, KU4OZ.  Thanks Johnny!