20m antenna and remote listening

I´ve been having some fun during last couple of days. I live in an apartment where I don't have that much of space for antennas and regular radio activity. But at a relatives house where a lot of trees is available I´ve been playing around a bit. I have been here some year ago and at that time I was laying out BOGs (Beverage on ground) antennas and I was DXing for AM stations in South America, but this time I wanted to focus on the amateur radio bands and in this case the 20m band. One easy antenna to build is a vertical using stubs to get a good match that I learnt about from SE5X. The radiator element was around 10 meters that I throw up in a tree.

If you would like to build this antenna, this PDF from SM0JZT describes the lengths of each segment. It´s in Swedish but I think you will understand if you are interested. Otherwise let me know via the comments.

When everything was installed last Monday it had went dark so 20m started to close and I never got a QSO. Instead I setup the QS1R and prepared for remote listening via LogMeIn Pro.

Below is a capture taken on my home computer. I have connected to the LogMeIn server via the web browser so this is the experience I got. The connection is a quite slow ADSL so I set the update rate of the waterfall to a slow setting. As this was done late when 20m was dead, this is 40m.




I went back on Thursday lunch last week and had one QSO with M3GFQ on 20m. I got 59 and I think that was a true report. :-)

Hopefully soon the new software for QS1R will be available. This will make it possible to run the server part remote and the GUI at home and be able to record RF to disk. I actually don´t feel so good about paying for this remote solution from LogMeIn, but as this opportunity to have the remote QS1R came up and I didn´t have time to setup streaming audio (open ports in firewall etc.) the Logmein solution is really working well. With new QS1R software I can hopefully use Linux instead of Windows. Remote QTH saga will continue...