100 Pound DXpedition Resources

This page contains pointers to resources for 100 Pound DXpeditions. Though the idea is simple: pack your radio and accessories and travel someplace fun, there are certainly things one can do to make such a trip more successful. I hope these resources give you ideas to make your trip a boost.

There are unique problems associated with my very lightweight DXpeditions. Selecting a compliment of antennas that will fit within the 100 pound weight budget is challenging, for example, and tradeoffs between performance, size, weight, and other factors must be considered carefully. I have begun collecting some of my notes and thinking on this matter in a series of white papers that explore these tradeoffs. The first volume, Antennas for 100 Pound DXpeditions: Computer-based antenna modeling and direct experience with lightweight portable antenna systems. Volume 1: Selected high band antennas [20-6m] can be obtained from the download page under the file name ant-model-xxx.pdf (the xxx is a version numbers such as 100).
Click on the above image to navigate to the download area. The models are available in a ZIP file, too.

A nice PDF write-up from the St. Johns (USVI) trip may be downloaded by clicking on the image above.

Though I have suspended activity on my blog, there is still a lot of good stuff in there about things I did well, and not so well. It isn’t cheating to learn from my mistakes! Click the logo above to visit the blog.

Though not a DXpedition resource, this is a really fun project for those days that have no sunspots. My local club held a kit building meeting where a group of first time builders used this guide to create their own RockMite transceivers. This is a pretty small and simple kit for an experienced builder, but anybody new to soldering or new to radio kit building could be a little intimidated by a bag of parts, schematics, and little else. This set of step-by-step instructions are just the edge a new builder needs to have the confidence to start--and finish-this beautiful kit. Get the PDF from the download area “Rockmite-build-manual.pdf”.