Signal Lab

Operator Spotlight · K1LDO · Eastern North Carolina

He Walked It Up Alone, Then Worked Franz Josef Land

Chris Diederich, K1LDO, had a 20 ft vertical already standing in an open North Carolina field. He wanted more. So he added a 4 ft extension, a 9 ft DX Whip, and a tilt adapter — which is to say he built himself a Skyline 33 out of the antenna he already owned. Then, with no crew and no crane, he walked the whole thing into the sky by himself. Since then: Franz Josef Land, Turkey, Greenland, and Western Australia from ten thousand miles away.

Ground to whip tip, the full 33 feet. No flag on this one — Chris runs it as a vertical, proudly.

One Person, One Sleeve, One Walk

This is the sentence the Tilt-Up Base exists to make possible, and Chris wrote it himself without being asked.

Assemble on the ground, where your hands and your eyes both work. Set the adapter to tilt. Short section into the sleeve. Then walk it up, the pole rising as you advance, geometry doing the lifting your back would otherwise do. It was not frictionless — one insulator refused to seat, and it came loose eventually with rags, a vise, and channel locks, which is the kind of detail marketing copy leaves out and operators need to hear. The point stands: the operator who can raise his own antenna is the operator who will lower it before a storm, service it when it needs service, and try things.

The Base Underneath It

Look at what Chris did below ground, because this is a man who builds things properly. A 3 ft hole with the sleeve set in 250 pounds of concrete. A 16 by 16 by 4 inch pad poured on top. And then the detail that gives him away: a 3/4 inch swept 90 degree conduit run through the concrete and down into the earth, aimed at the shack, so the LMR-400 leaves the base underground and never crosses the grass. No coax to mow around. No coax to trip on. No coax baking in the sun. That conduit took an afternoon and it will pay him back for twenty years.

Sleeve, concrete, tilt adapter, feedpoint. The unglamorous half hour that decides the next twenty years.

First Contact: San Diego, Then Turkey And Greenland

The first QSO after the walk-up was San Diego during the North American QSO Party, on 20 meters, a solid 59 — as were, in his words, the myriad other NAQP contacts that evening. Then the evening delivered its closing argument: Turkey and northwest Greenland on 20 meter phone, both 59 both ways. That is a first night. Most antennas do not get a first night like that.

Franz Josef Land, And The One That Got Away First

RI1FJL is not a casual entity. Franz Josef Land sits deep in the Russian Arctic, and working it means putting a signal up a polar path that is closed more often than it is open. Chris got there on 15 meter FT8 — but not on the first try. Days earlier he had exchanged signal reports with them and could not close the contact, conditions collapsing before the final 73. He had not even had the DXpedition on his radar and had to go research what he was hearing; at that point they were showing as maritime mobile, which may well have been part of the trouble.

He went back. He got it. That is the whole hobby in three sentences.

Ten Thousand Miles, Repeatedly

Australia, New Zealand, China, and Japan — numerous times, not as flukes. Western Australia is roughly ten thousand miles from his QTH. Part of that is the antenna and part of it is the ground it stands on: Chris has 76 acres, 45 of them open field, which means a vertical with an unobstructed low takeoff angle in every direction that matters. A vertical wants the horizon, and his horizon goes on for a while.

240 Entities And Still Hunting

Chris sits at 240 DXCC entities, hunts and pounces anything new, and is presently working on Cambodia, Laos, and the Seychelles. He is retired — twice, he notes — which puts him at the radio during the daylight hours when those particular paths open. There are worse retirement plans.

The top nine feet. Aperture you can see, on bands you can hear.

What It Does Not Do

Chris keeps an off-center-fed dipole in the air with its feedpoint at 45 feet, and he is direct about why: the Greyline will not tune 160 for him, so the wire fills that gap. He is also direct about the other half of the comparison — the dipole is noisier than the vertical, which he attributes to the inherent physics of that arrangement, and he is right to.

We publish that because it is true and because the physics is worth understanding. Radiation resistance falls with the square of an antenna's length in wavelengths — that is Kraus — and on 160 meters a 33 ft radiator is electrically tiny. Every foot of aperture is fighting uphill down there, and where the match finally settles depends on your tuner, your feedline, and your ground. Jakob in Iceland gets reasonable results on 160 from 28 feet with a different feed arrangement entirely. Chris does not, with his. Both statements are true, and an operator who tells you only the first one is selling you something.

One more note worth passing along, since Chris runs his tuner in the shack: his five ferrites are at the feedpoint end of the long run, which is exactly right. The companion choke belongs between the tuner and the radio. Two ends, never the middle — the full argument, with W7EL, K9YC, W2DU, and W7SX carrying it, is here: Where The Choke Goes →

Chase your own Arctic path tonight — live cluster, RBN, and band conditions run free on our DX Console, where Greyline owners glow gold. K1LDO is one of them.