This piece of kit had been sitting in tropical storage for 4 years. It, and some other gear, was unfortunately the target of a massive amount of mildew during that time.
Cleanup underway
I was worried that I would end up losing the versipack. I had a three-day assault pack made by Tactical Tailor that I ended up ditching that was stored with this bag because it was much worse shape (the Colossus was stored inside the pack). The Colossus went back to Canada with me slung across my body. The smell was overpowering at times. When I got home, I just let it sit for a few months to see if the smell would lessen. It didn’t. Eventually I purchased some Borax and mixed it with a sink full of hot water and went to town scrubbing every piece of the bag, both inside and out. It took a few hours, but it was way better than it looked when I had recovered it. The smell had mostly abated, but was still noticeable. With a big camping trip coming up, I purchased a pack of cedar balls and tossed them in every pocket of the bag in the hopes that it would fix the remaining scent. This seemingly worked and the rest of the smell was gone after a week in the outdoors.
Over the summer I had the chance to go camping on Main Duck Island in Lake Ontario. The place is rather inaccessible, unless you have a boat. Luckily, I do know someone who has a boat.
The trip out to the island was fun. I normally don’t get seasick, but I had a very light brunch before we departed and the choppiness of the lake didn’t play nicely with that. There was some talk about diverting to a closer island because of me tightly holding onto the bucket, but I told the skipper to keep on going. No point in turning back half-way to our destination.
We made it and I quickly got off the boat and kissed dry land (clearly I’m no sailor). We were told the island is a busy place most of the time, but when we pulled up to the dock there were no other ships in sight. We set up camp on some high ground near the dock.
The view from the port side of the vessel
We spent the next 2.5 days on the island, exploring what it had to offer. The island used to be settled for a time with a lighthouse, school, some homes and various other buildings. The lighthouse remains but is automated. Not much else exists except a few abandoned buildings and ruins.
The lighthouse. The water was apparently quite low this year, these rocks are normally underwater up to the treeline.Lightkeeper’s HomeBig ole’ snapper on one of the trails
I also brought an HT with me as well as my Arrow II beam to see what repeaters I could successfully hit from the island. Some good contacts were made across a number of repeaters. My Yaesu FT-70D was programmed with a list of repeaters that fall within 80km of the island. The results of my testing are below:
Near Lighthouse:
VE3KTO (Picton) – S9. Had a QSO with VE3GSI.
VE3KBR (Kingston) – S1. No QSO.
VE3TJU (Picton) – S9. No OSO.
West Side of Island:
VA3LGA (Lansdowne) – S5. Had a QSO with VA3ASZ mobile.
AC2GE (Dexter, NY) – S6. No QSO.
KD2CPX (Dexter, NY) – S1. No QSO.
KC2ELX (Watertown, NY) – S4/5. No QSO.
East Side of Island
VA3LGA (Lansdowne) – S9. No QSO.
AC2GE (Dexter, NY) – S9. Had a QSO with WD0DBT, heard me calling on another repeater and was waiting for me.
KD2CPX (Dexter, NY) – S5. No QSO.
KC2ELX (Watertown, NY) – S9. No QSO.
W2OSC (Oswego, NY) – S9. No QSO.
WB2OOY(Watertown, NY) – S9. Heard another station but didn’t catch the full callsign, possibly K3QT-, no response to further calls.
W2WLR (Watertown, NY) – S9. No QSO.
WN8Z (Fulton, NY) – S1. Very scratchy, no QSO.
Facing VA3LGA repeater in Lansdowne, ON
The furthest repeater I was able to connect to was VA3LGA in Lansdowne, ON which, from the lighthouse at the northern tip of the island, is ~72 kilometers. Granted, this is mainly over open water, but has been my furthest VHF contact to date, excluding any packet connections to the ISS in orbit.
I had originally planned to see if I could do some satellite operations from the island too, but I had forgotten to load my UV-5R into my bag when we departed for Kingston.
All-in-all it was a nice and relaxing experience with some good testing thrown in. I am hoping to get back out there again next year with more transmitting capabilities.
As the months rolled by since first modding the RAM Stubby cup holder mount, the rubber fins on the mount began to give up on their job of preventing the thing from sliding around. As a result, the mount began to tip over whenever it was in use. This is not optimal so I fixed it!
I had some closed cell foam kicking around and cut two small blocks out of it and wedged them between three of the rubber fins. The blocks are a bit thicker than the gaps between the mount and the cup holder. This is holding everything as it should and is now capable of holding 2 HT’s without falling over while cornering. The added benefit is that I can still move the mount between vehicles if needed as the blocks can be re-positioned or removed if necessary.
I made my first satellite contact during a pass of the AO-27 satellite (EYESAT-1) on December 29, 2021. This was my first attempt at satellite work and was marginally successful. I could hear the traffic on the satellite and was able to hear and be heard by another station (N2FYA), although I did have issues on my end with properly receiving. The audio was very hit or miss which could be from me not being able to match my satellite antenna with the satellites antenna polarity (they do tumble through space), but I believe is mainly from my connection from the radio to my earbuds.
I had my Wouxun KG-UVD1P hooked up as my receive radio mounted to the antenna boom feeding my Olympus voice recorder with a 2.5mm to 3.5mm aux. cable which then had a set of earbuds attached. I’m thinking that the aux. cable being near some of the antenna elements may have allowed RF interference to affect the received signal. I have since added some ferrite beads to the aux. cable in the hopes of reducing any RFI in the future.
Growing tired of having my radios roll around in my vehicle while out and about, I made the decision to get a RAM mount to mount everything to. I didn’t want to drill any holes to install it, mainly due to most locations being inadequate for that method of mounting, so I instead opted for a RAM Stubby cupholder mount base. While this worked in theory, in practice it didn’t work so well.
I chose the long length arm (~5″) to get the radio up high enough combined with the marine electronics mount, which is essentially a 6-1/4″ x 2″ aluminum plate for mounting fishfinders to. It provides a decent mounting platform for handheld radios via their belt clips but does merit some additional tinkering with to make things perfect, but that’s an aside for now.
The Stubby mount is weighted, but with the long arm and plate mount, coupled with the weight of a radio, it’s not a stable mounting option as originally thought. Under normal urban driving conditions, the entire mount assembly tips over. Not ideal.
I decided to take the mount apart and see what could be done with it. The bottom of the mount is held in with 3 clips and can be easily pried apart. The base also has a screw in the center which secures a steel weight. This weight does not extend the full length of the interior of the base which is the reason for its tippiness (autocorrect tells me that’s not a proper word, but whatever).
I weighed everything and determined that the base weighs in at 490g, while the steel slug alone weighs 378g. I went to my local outdoor store and picked up some BB’s to add further weight to the base. I filled the space between the top of the base and the top of the slug and then filled the gaps between the slug and the wall of the base. This added an extra 395g of weight bringing the new base weight up to 886g. With this modification, the problems with tip over have been removed. Now I just need to find a way to keep the radios from sliding off the plate mount on top. Another project for another day.
Stock Stubby base weightThe steel slug395g of copper coated BB’s, the container weighs 66gReassembled Stubby base weight
The International Space Station held another SSTV event during the Winter 2021 break and I was determined to catch all of the images that they would broadcast this time around. They were to be all related to lunar exploration, past, present and future. I had dabbled with receiving SSTV images from the ISS previously, but never really planned for it properly. I did my research and found that all the suitable passes for this event were all early morning passes for each day (ranging from 1 AM to 9 AM).
Armed with my trusty Arrow II satellite antenna, a radio and my smartphone, I headed out morning after morning to collect the 12 images that would be broadcast.
Out of those 12 images, I managed to snag 10 (I missed images 10 & 11). Much better than my two prior attempts and the quality of the images was much better as well. The Arrow II was definitely worth the investment. If you go here you can type my callsign into the search box (see the image on the Amateur Radio page for my callsign) to see all of the images I captured.
maltosekincaid.com 