This weekend was the debut of my NVARC ugly filters as part of the VK3SAT contest station for the Remembrance Day contest.
I have built filters for 160m, 80m, 40m and 20m. These were the four bands of interest for the weekend contest.
When setting up the station we also set up temporary antennas for 160m and 80m and used the in-situ antennas for the other two bands.
After running cable for the antennas each band got its own table, chair, PC and radio as well as one ugly filter.
The filters for 20m, 40m and 80m seemed to work well with no complaints from the operators about excessive interference from the other bands. Sure, I could here the other station when I tuned on to a harmonic but apart from that we all worked happily side by side.
The same can’t be said for the 160m filter. This filter I was not too pleased with its performance during building and I couldn’t get it to work quite as well as the other.
Peter, VK3AJ, was running our 160m station and within about 10 minutes of starting he came over and tapped me on the shoulder and said, “your filter doesn’t work well as a filter, but it is a great attenuator.”
He took the filter out of line and ran naked for the 6 hours he was there. We didn’t notice any great amounts of interference from 160m so maybe we don’t need a 160m filter after all.
The other three stations ran with the filters for the whole time.
Our RD score is not all that fantastic but that has more to do with our compromised location and tower size than the filters we were using.
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