ARRL Field Day 2010 Helium Balloon

This video was taken at the ARRL 2010 Field Day site for the Gulf Coast Amateur Radio Club located in New Port Richey. This was our first attempt at flying a helium balloon with a long wire attached. We used a single conductor 24 gauge wire of 130 feet long. Made successful voice and digital contacts around the country with other clubs.
A big thanks to Bill NG4L who recorded and edit this video.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• helium balloon
• field day
• long wire antenna
• GCARC

[ic751a55]

(Cont from below)

If you have a decent CMC choke & 1:1 balun on the ground at the tuner / radio you could use the shield of the coax as the bottom half of the dipole, and just use some light gauge wire for the top half

~58' of wire & ~58' of coax will provide a vertical center-fed 80m dipole and the shield of the bottom half will radiate down to the CMC choke & 1:1 balun, necessary to keep RF out of the rig & mic.

Best to use a well shielded, metal mic and a real good ground rod system!

73

[ic751a55]

I hope that rig has a processor / compressor since those heil ICM mics are typically not a good DX / Contesting mic due to having a more muffled sound. With the processor it should be fine. If you can get hold of a Turner +3 CB desk mic and add a .01µƒd in series with the internal preamp output you'll get rave audio reports. I even added a VR to adjust how much I want to bypass the bass filter capacitor which acts as a tone control.

Why not a 120' center-fed coaxial vertical dipole for 80m!?!

[M70ACARRY]

Nasty noise on receive.