After years of planning, buying, building, cabling, interfacing and testing, I was finally have an operational ham radio station on the air in a contest once again. Friday night was spent working on the trench for the most part. The coax, control cables (SteppIR and Prosistel Rotor) and extra pull ropes were fed through [...]
Last night we were able to install the SteppIR 4 element yagi on the tower at about 71 ft - roughly 11 feet below the Cushcraft XM240. Coax and control cables for the Prosistel Rotor and SteppIR have been brought to ground level but are not yet installed. If things go well tonight, I will [...]
The Cushcraft XM240 was installed on Sunday evening. On Monday, Dave finished clamping the antenna to the mast and lowered the coax. That evening I tested the antenna and was a bit surprised at what I found… On my Icom 746, I checked the SWR (yeah, I know, SWR ain’t everything - but you’d [...]
My father-in-law and I were working on the coax trench, PVC sections and ground rods when Dave (KI0Q) called to see if we wanted to try to put the antennas on the tower. We didn’t have a lot of daylight to work with and we were concerned about rain later in the day, but we [...]
I managed to get the SteppIR 4 element yagi built yesterday and today I added the truss systems to the SteppIR and Cushcraft XM240. Additionally, this afternoon with the help of my neighbor, we were able to get a trench for the coax/pvc. Fortunately, central Iowa had a picture perfect October day today as [...]
I’ve decided to take a new approach to dealing with PL-259 coax connectors. It’s a move away from completely soldered connectors to a crimp style PL-259 with a soldered tip.
It seems as though I’ve ruined many PL-259 coax connections and I don’t completely trust the ones that I’ve made. The biggest problem is usually the [...]
Spent some time in the past few days building my 40 meter antenna. Unfortunately, we’ve had some rain, so I finished the project in the mud. Although the Cushcraft XM240 Big Thunder is a small yagi for 40 meters it is a very large ham radio antenna by my standards.
The XM240 is a two [...]
A couple hams in Europe have reportedly broken the 200 word-per-minute barrier in the world of competitive High Speed Telegraphy (HST). How fast is this? Here is an example of the word PARIS being sent in CW at 200 wpm.
Of the seven HST CW-wizards who attempted to break the 1000 cpm (200 words per minute) [...]
It took awhile, but the delivery from Industrial Communication Engineers (ICE) arrived Monday. I’m now getting close to having all that I need in terms of grounding for the new ham radio tower.
Here is the list of products that I’ll be using for lightning/surge protection in the grounding system:
ICE Coaxial Surge Suppressors - Model 303U [...]