I bought a couple of new items lately so I can operate indoors through these cold Minnesota winters.  I love getting outdoors when it is nice out and operating from campsites and parks, but not so much once we get some snow and it is below freezing.

The first thing I bought was the MFJ-933 loop tuner, and the MFJ-58B kit to go with it.  My impressions on the tuner itself are great, I find it very easy to get the antenna tuned and get on the air. The instructions say to use the radio to tune, however I’ve used my antenna analyzer instead.  Since this is a loop antenna the bandwidth is very low, so you’ve got to tune it to a frequency and stick very close to it.  When you are outside of that resonant spot, the SWR is around 20:1-30:1.  I don’t want the finals in my rig to deal with that, I’ll let the analyzer take that instead.   The instructions tell you exactly what to do (minus using the analyzer).

Now the antenna kit itself (MFJ-58B)- don’t get me wrong it works, but I feel like it is something I would buy at a flea market.  The only valuable part here are the wires themselves, the rest of the kit is crap you could find anywhere.  The PVC pipe is clearly surplus PVC, it has adhesive from torn off labels and has scratches everywhere.  The longest wire for 40-60 meters is too big for the PVC, so the kit includes what it calls “Loop wire clips” to hang it on curtains/bookselves/etc.  These “clips” are simply clothespins.  Don’t get me wrong, this all works functionally well, but for $50 I expect a little bit more of quality and little bit less crap you could buy anywhere.

For me this setup works very well.  I made my first voice contact on 10 meters, first contact to Mexico, and made a number of voice contacts on 20 meters as well.  This is much easier than setting up the Buddipole inside as my apartment isn’t big enough for it to fit in one room.  It also brings down some of the electrical interference that makes using the Buddipole inside my apartment less practical (unless the power is out).

I also bought a Signalink USB and tried JT65.  This was my first attempt at digital communications and it worked very well.  I made my first 40-meter contact and my first digital contact at the same time.  I found the Signalink very easy to setup and interface with my radio.  Once I was up and running I found the https://www.pskreporter.info/ website and was thrilled to see my signal making it out and to so many places.

I’m so glad I got into this activity.  It is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and now that I finally can, it has been a blast.