Today I made my first ham radio contact in about 5 years! With the rain at Cape May we’ve had some much appreciated down time. I had been working on repacking, but needed to be extra quiet during nap time.

So I broke out my hand held and programmed in a local repeater. (That took the first hour since I had long forgotten how to set it up) I put my call out “Good afternoon, this is K3FXS”, and got an immediate response from the repeater operator! A nice chat for a few moments, but I was back on the air!

Next up was to assemble my Arrow Antenna that I use to use for satellite contacts.

It’s called an Arrow since it’s made of lightweight aluminum arrow shafts. When apart, it’s in a cloth bag about 3″ by 22″, so it makes it very transportable.

At this point we are at dead low tide and my direct shot is through the Rt 109 bridge. But I was able to make a simplex (direct) contact on 446 MHz at both 5 watts and at 1 watt. So with the Arrow I should be able to communicate with (aka “hit”) the repeaters everywhere we go.

Next up will be to get the other radio to work. That will need a sunny day since that antenna needs to be mounted outside. But it’s great to be back on the air again!