Finally: Failure

We finally hit the wall on how far our little 5.5 watt hand held VHF transceiver will transmit.  Encouraged by our success in reaching 63.4 miles to the Jump Off Peak repeater, today we attempted to reach Mount Harrison (122 miles) and Sawtell Peak (80 miles). (Click here for an interactive map shown in the screen shot above.)  Finally, we enjoyed failure.  We could raise nary a peep from either repeater.  For Sawtell, we even relocated our test site to two other locations with no luck.  So, for all practical purposes, our effective range now stands at the "high water mark" of 63.4 miles with the homegrown Yagi and 52 miles with the Long Ranger.

That's not too shabby but we are itching to do better.  We suspect our bearing for both repeaters may have been off a few degrees.  Also, the wind was blowing hard this afternoon, gusting into the mid-20 mph range.  It was very difficult to hold the Yagi antenna steady.

We are going to calculate a much more precise bearing for each of those repeaters from our test sites and give it another try after we also learn how to create a stable mount for the antenna.  We won't quit trying to reach those repeaters until we have exhausted all options, even if it means rebuilding the Yagi again with much closer plumb and square alignment and tolerances.

One of the net benefits of today's effort was that we really took our organization to the next level.  We used printed checklists and filled in all the appropriate data fields for each attempted test.  We also brought along a digital voice recorder and turned it on when we began to transmit our test signal.  In this manner, we will be able to keep much better logs of our various tests on this antenna (and others in the future).

Even though we are thoroughly enjoying our failure today, we have only just begun!  Tomorrow's another day!

Cheers & 73, jp