Got a "kids fishing for squirrels" story if you want to hear it. A little sad though, for the squirrel.Originally Posted by W3MIV
Rain past three days here. Thursday is going to be mast drop day.
Got a "kids fishing for squirrels" story if you want to hear it. A little sad though, for the squirrel.
Rain past three days here. Thursday is going to be mast drop day.
Red Drum? I thought that was a medical condition that went with beer nuts or cotton balls.
Update: I've managed to bend two 10' sections of heavy duty, thick wall antenna mast.
Plan B: I have 2 more 10' sections and a 10' section of 1.75" galvanized steel water pipe. I'm going to slide the sections into the steel pipe and put it up with only a device to raise and lower the wire antenna and balun. Like a flag pole.
I think part of my problem today was the weight of the wire and the fact that the coax is inside the mast tubes. I'll raise the section inside the galvanized tube once it is up. A little grunt should get it done. This will diminish about 8 feet of the overall original height that I started with. Whatever right?
An addendum: The wire, I thought for some strange reason that I had 500' of 10 gauge wire. Well, it is actually 250' of 8ga. Wow, right?
I've had it for years and was saving it for marriage.
Or from watching "The Shining" [click] too many times.
73 de Mike, N5RLR
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"I drink for the honorable purpose of getting bagged." -- Jackie Gleason
"It is my belief...that the truth is generally preferable to lies." -- Albus Dumbledore
Well call me stupid but it makes sense now. My plans for an 80m ant turned out to be a 160. I don't know if that's good or bad but I'll leave it as is for a while. Tomorrow I'll measure out the window line and check the coax going to the 10m ant. I think the center conductor (or something) broke at the ant connector.
Hmmm... something about that image that I really like Paul... ;)
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
--Philip K. Dick
Charles, you should be able to tune up that antenna for 80m just fine, although the pattern might not be as good as you'd like. Do you have a field strength meter to check it out? If you don't like the pattern you can always try putting in a pair of traps.
All the world’s a stage, but obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to tell if we’re living in a tragedy or a farce.
160 is one of the HF bands that has such a wide bandwidth that the useful wire antenna bandwidth is only about 100kHz or so.
I use a 1/4 wave shorted stub at the feed point on mine and it gives me about 200kHz or so of relatively flat bandwidth. Easy and cheap to make out of TV twin lead with a 259B analyzer. Line impedance doesn't matter much since it's infinite at the design frequency with a shorted stub. The stub appears inductive as you go down in frequency and capacitative as you go up. Artificially lengthens and shortens your antenna accordingly. And, you can just let the stub dangle in the breeze.
Ah, about dangling in the breeze, that's on Saturday nights!
The original wire I had up is still louder on most bands except 160. It is even louder than the 160m ant on AMBCB.
I need to test these some time with a willing Island participant.
Yesterday I took down the 10m ant and saw where the outer jacket of the cable slipped about a eighth of an inch. It looked the most suspect as I tested for continuity and shorts and weird impedances. I cut off that end and tested it again and the problem was solved so I got out the torch and removed the old end and cleaned and prepped it for remounting. While I had everything down and apart, I went ahead and "refreshed" the other PL-259. Everything went back together and works fine business. I am considering raising this ant a few more feet as the present coax will allow.
Today I'm going to see what I can do with all the 450Ω window line. (doublet folded dipole configuration) It's going to have to go over the black walnut tree and I suppose the dipole configuration will have to droop. I really want this one to be best on 80m. I want it to hear better than the wire I've been using on 80 because if that is the best I can do with wire on 80 then I am really confused LOL! (and I am)
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