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Camb-Hams DX Blog

A few people have asked us what equipment we’re using here in FP, so here’s a quick run-down…

We’ve got up to four stations on the air at a time, so starting at the radio end of things:

  • Elecraft K3
  • Icom IC-7000
  • Icom IC-706
  • Yaesu FT-450

The K3 and FT-450 are connected to linear amplifiers to give them a little more power (typically about 300W), but the IC-7000 and IC-706 are barefoot at around 100W.

Next up, we use a set of DuneStar 300 series bandpass filters to reduce QRM between the stations. This is particularly important with the IC-7000, which generates a rather large amount of out-of-band noise. The DuneStars work very well, though being 3 pole filters, isolation between some of the WARC bands and the adjacent bands isn’t quite enough – typically 17m and 15m, for example.

For antennas, we’ve got a veritable farm of verticals out on the beach – quarter waves on 10m, 12m, 15m, 17m, 20m, 30m and 40m, and a dipole for 80m. The location adjacent to salt water gives us a definite advantage in the direction of Europe, but since Miquelon is relatively flat, the take-off in other directions is good as well. To keep weight down, these are fed with RG-58 and RG-8X coax – a little more loss than you’d have on a fixed station, but much friendier on airline luggage allowances.

Finally, some of the ancillary kit:

  • A combination of Sennheiser PC350 and Heil headsets and foot switches
  • A WinKey for CW operation
  • Win-Test networked on four laptops for logging
  • Lightweight switch-mode power supplies
  • Lots of UK / European mains adaptors!