Ken Head –K7KCHBoyd Borden – KI6OUFJustin Grenier – KE7JJG

ARES Radio exerciseNovember 14 2015

Initial station setup at the oldSt George airport

The only disadvantage of the old airport was the drag racing event that is behind us… Sometimes when we keyed the radio the noise went over the frequency…

Boyd has the same antenna setup as Kens (Lowes TV antenna segments), however he has a patio umbrella base which made it easy to setup and we were able to place the antenna wherever we wanted and adjust it.

Boyd’s truck in the background with our table & gear setup. This took only 15 minutes total to get everything connected and on the air.

After the last training Ken and I went on at the new airport I realized the tripod for pointing the solar panels directly at the sun was necessary. Boyd had two 30 watt solar panels and I had one 30 watt panel. I had never attempted to assemble the array before with multiple panels which is why there are only two on the tripod….

Boyd’s laptop and Yaesu FT-817 …. We connected the Yaesu to the Anderson power connectors on the Yeti 400 and plugged the laptop into the front AC outlett. We also had several handheld radios to monitor the various frequencies as we were a relay station.

Even with the sun shade and an additional sun screen/panel on the side the monitor was difficult to see because of the brightness of the sun. We really need to come up with an outdoor laptop shade.

I wanted to include a photo of Boyd’s antenna setup..

Again this was very easy to work with and assembly went swiftly without requiring instructions

Absolutely loved this radio and Boyd’s setup. The speaker below it made it easy to hear and because everything wasn’t in a box/together we could spread out the equipment and everyone was able to help. Boyd also brought this plastic/rubber mat that we put on top of the table. This kept everything from rolling/sliding around and was really clever.

Yeti 400 Solar Generator. We had the radio and laptop plugged into this the entire time. The input watts was always exceeded the output watts.

By adjusting the solar panels as the day progressed I was able to reach 54 watts incoming for a few moments, however 40-45 watts was the average. I learned later that the temperature and angle of the sun also are a factor in the amount of power.

The view wasn’t that bad either…. We live in such a nice community….

Again the view…

• The goal zero non-folding panels are designed to assembled together on a nice flat surface, not the back of a vehicle. In addition the clips are a pain to work with.

• Laptop monitors are nearly impossible to see without shade, this should be an easy fix!• Most radios are not programmed with common channels/frequencies… (national simplex)• You should have someone with a handheld monitoring a common channel when you are

sending/receiving FLDigi in case there are issues and you need to stop transmitting.• I would like to experiment with a Yagi antenna in some of these areas and see if we can get

better results, especially on simplex• Images have to be resized before they are sent digitally… this is easy if you know how to do

it, but most phones capture 3-5Mb images by default.

What we learned