Notre Dame Fire

[NM5TF]

so far investigators have not determined how the fire started....:snicker:

[KG4CGC]

I was ... never mind. It's posted in Rumpus.

[PA5COR]

Electrical short started it they cncluded.
Just got a pesent from the internet provider, went up to 50/5 Mbps for te same price from 40/4 Mbps.
Slowest speed we can chose, we can get up to 600 Mbps here, companies 1 Gbps, glassfiber.

[kb2vxa]

Quasi Modo, an encrypted Internet protocol bearing some resemblance to Mode M. If you want encryption that NOBODY has the key to, exchange your Modem for a Quasimodo.

Use "exchange" in a sentence. When I spent my change all I had was exchange. Tada BUM!

Is this beginning to sound like Rocky & Bullwinkle? This is the Wabac machine, Sherman.............

[G1TWS]

York Minster had a fire caused by a lighting strike. A few days before the then Archbishop of York preached a sermon there, when the stated that God did not exist.

[WZ7U]

Bazinga!

[K4PIH]

Hello Quasimoto!

[N8YX]

Electrical short started it they concluded.

If that's true, some contractor's insurance is probably gonna get loved very tenderly.

[n6hcm]

If that's true, some contractor's insurance is probably gonna get loved very tenderly.

building is owned by the French government so likely self-insured (not that any insurer would touch it in the first place) ...

[kb2vxa]

Zeus, whom we stripped of his name and left him with only his title, God hasn't improved his aim in the 40 years I had antennas... thankfully. He practices on old pine trees in Canada, and is pretty good at it. I have this strike without all the katzenjammer and much better quality than Kiddiephone Camera captured from the house behind the tree in this video. Although I can upload stills I can't upload videos from my computer, so this kiddie noise from Kiddie Tube will have to do.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZui-aV_JI8

[NM5TF]

it seems that Macrons estimate of 5 years to rebuild Notre Dame was a little off....:icon_rolleyes:

[NM5TF]

KB2VXA.....you say that Gawd has lousy aim re: lightning ??? :icon_rolleyes:

our house has been hit twice in the last 25+ years I have lived here....last time he/she/they/it had a direct
hit on my Imax 2000.....Gawd = 1 Imax 2000 = 0

[PA5COR]

My Imax 2000 looks very different........;)

[N8YX]

Several miles to my south lies the town of Clinton. On one of the roads leading north out of town there's a curve. Over the years, the house which sits on the left-hand side tract of land has had several CB verticals atop a TV antenna tower. First was a Shakespeare Big Stick. Others which followed were various Antron/Imax offerings.

God apparently has the range down right, as every one of these suffered a lightning strike and resembled the photo which 'TF posted.

Appears the owners - former or new - aren't into CB any longer. The antenna and tower are gone.

[N2SR]

it seems that Macrons estimate of 5 years to rebuild Notre Dame was a little off....:icon_rolleyes:

And Beatty White.

[kb2vxa]

All of the antennas I've seen and owned that took hits had one thing in common with the Imax 2000, they were all CB antennas. It seems that God and Roger Nye The FCC Guy had/have one thing in common, they have it in for CBers. I had several antennas take hits with no damage, one was a CB antenna, a Shakespeare Big Stick that was a right royal PITA until I blew it up testing a 500W amp I had finished repairing for Flipperdoo, dig that crazy handle! That BTW was the only CB amp I've ever seen that wasn't a piece of RFI generating, audio distorting crap, it was a Class AB2 grid driven 4CX250B that would have made a dandy amp for ham operation changing QRP for QRO.

The story of that lightning strike is as strange as any of the stranger than fiction tales, strange because there was no damage and I lived to tell the tale. It was a dark and stormy night, we were all sitting around the campfire when someone said tell us a story. It was a dark and stormy night, I was sitting at my grounded steel office desk in my steel office chair wearing headphones and holding a silver lollipop, an Astatic D-104 when it happened. I hadn't noticed the storm creeping up, that added to my terror when in mid transmission the room lit up like 10,000 suns and there was the sound of an atomic blast. Headphones flew in one direction, the microphone flew in another, and there I was flat on my back looking up at cartoon tweety birds... and this was before Twitter Tweets like Twump. I tought I taw a puddy tat? When the world stopped spinning and I got back on the air they told me they heard a bang and part of a scream, then my carrier dropped, what happened? By the rumbling I heard before stupidly putting the cans on again it must have been lightning. The next morning I held close inspection, the only evidence was the top of the antenna discolored, no damage, everything worked as before.

I came to the conclusion that a well earthed mast saved my life, but I would never trust it twice. It was a 50ft telescopic steel mast telescoped down to 40ft making a triple thick wall at the topmost of three wall brackets on the side of the house. Too bad South River went out of business, they were the strongest brackets I've ever seen. The assembly held up against Donna, Donna, the prima donna... NO! Hurricane Donna! The mast stood on a concrete block taking the weight, the 10ft galvanized awning rod I used as an earthing stake was only a foot from it, the connecting wire was a copper scrap left over from a pole transformer installation when the neighborhood wiring was upgraded. Wires connecting the pole peg to the "tree" where the wires come together under it is much heavier than it looks up in the air, the conductor is about the diameter of the joint in your thumb. That's code for a conductor in free air carrying 500 amps.

[PA5COR]

Maybe the main hit as directly on the pole holding the antenna up, and just a small side fork for hitting the antenna.
Anyway, the Imax is just 19 meters high here, the 23 meter high vertical for 160 - 10 is grounded with lightning, with a 4 meter copper tube directly under the antenna in silt sea clay and 2 lines of 3 meter to 2 other ground rods, cable is the size of RG8 Coax....
For the rest 3000 feet of some bare some covered copper radials 3 mmthick in the ground with 14 more ground rods.
Transceiver directly on another ground rod of 6 meters massive copper 12 mm thick with 6 mm 3 meter long wire connecting to the station.
Silver soldered all the shit checked out every year if it all still is in 100% condition.
Added 15 watt 100 K resistor from vertical to ground, and spark gap, with lightning on the way connection with auto tuner disabled and direct connection to ground made with 8 m copper strip..

[N8YX]

I did similar with both of my HF verticals - one a 6BTV and the other an Imax2000 - except there's an RF choke between feedpoint and ground to bleed off DC potential. Heavy solid copper wires tie the masts on which these antennas are mounted to a number of ground rods at their bases.

One day I may remove the Imax in favor of a modified "BTV". The main one covers 80-40-30-20-15-10 as-is, and I've got a couple more of the things in various states of disassembly and completeness. Thus, 11/12/17/60 might be an interesting experiment - and a nice counterpart to my existing Hustler installation.

For anyone wishing to play with these...they use a sleeve-capacitor design for the traps, and the resonating coil turn count has been empirically calculated as 0.66 * cutoff F(MHz). When I finish the work on this project I'll post a suitable "Mods..." article.