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Losing Shannon Recollections of Kent Dyer Please note, I will not have accurate dates or facts. This is because I am dumping my memory out, and honestly, there will be sections out of order or factually wrong, based on my memory, which was overwhelmed with fear, sadness, and the full gamut of emotions that comes with your spouse and love dealing with a terrible prognosis: Stage 4 metastatic cancer. I guess it all started when my wife passed away in June of 2024. She'd been suffering from cancer since November of 2023. The hit came about a week after I filed for retirement from the state of Texas. We thought we had everything locked in and were just going to cruise from that point on. We were talking about what we were going to do, where we were going to go, and how we were going to live our lives. Then, I guess, life or nature or whatever threw a huge curveball at us. Shannon had pretty bad back pain for a few weeks. She had gone to the chiropractor a number of times. She went to t...
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Situation: Overload

It has been a while since I posted, and it's actually been a while since I have dabbled in ham radio.  I finally did get my mobile rig fixed in the truck, but the antennas in the shack have been unplugged since July when I had to alter my window for an air conditioner.  (Too much hot air in the shack was making it impossible for me to actually work.) On top of that, we have some health issues in the family we're primarily concerned with, so everything else is set aside.  I have been considering blowing a hole through the shack wall, mounting a weatherproof box outside, and reconnecting the radio gear, but that depends on how everybody is feeling and if I can peel off a few hours. We are dealing with some family health stuff here that is pretty pressing, but I am being pushed to be more social and reengage with my circle of friends... So I better get on it. 
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A New Challenge

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One of the first things I did when I started into amateur radio was to play trivia on my club's Friday net.  I knew I was filled with useless information, but I didn't realize I had THAT MUCH useless information stuffed into my brain.  After a few games, it became clear that I was a bit of a trivia savant.  Normal questions in the game had a question and 4 multiple-choice answers.   For years, I've known that I have a knack for pattern matching. I'm sure it's tied to my ADHD, but the way my brain works is to immediately discard 2 answers as completely wrong and then to rapidly negotiate internally on which of the 2 remaining answers is more plausible.  I then click on the answer and wait to see if I'm close or not.  Usually, it works out.  There's nothing to study or prep, and I don't look answers up before I click.  I ended up with a nickname:  The Trivia Robot - based on my callsign. As far as my pattern-matching skills, I enjoy scanni...
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Heavy topic

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It seems that my antenna is top heavy.  I guess having a framework of EMT conduit with 3 antennas mounted at the very top just might cause that, I don't know physics, but I can see that happening.   About a week ago, we had a nasty storm.  A real "oh shit, go unplug the antennas from the passthrough and pray you don't get hit by lightning at the same time" moment.  It rained something like 4.5" in this area, along with a ton of lightning and thunder. After that passed, sometime the next day, I plugged everything back in and fired up the scanner and the FT-991.  Not much ham traffic, but that isn't unusual during the day, but there was a little bit of aviation traffic being picked up.  After a while listening while working, I decided to go to the kitchen for a drink.  I'd just refilled the bird feeders the other day and looked out to see my lovely antenna pole horizontal on the ground, with a few of the discone elements buried in the dirt.  T...
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General blog post - Redux

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Today was my confrontation with the Quiz Master(s).   To steal a statement from Scott - KI5OBD - "Once I take the test I CAN STOP STUDYING!" I took the test and passed, so now I'm KI5RBT/AG for acting general.  To put the rubber on the road, I'm going to have to put some copper (wire) up into some trees, across the backyard, over a shed, along the fence-line and down the other side of the house.  Some 132 feet of wire strung out - to hopefully allow me to start bouncing radio signals off the F2 layer of the ionosphere (OMG, applied knowledge!) and talking to other hams in the range of about 2500 miles distance. As usual for me when faced with a looming thing like a test, I over-prepared.  It's all good - I did try to go beyond just learning the exam answers and asked myself a lot of "why" questions, generally followed by flipping through the licensing manual and finding out that the math was too complex for me especially at 2am, and I just accepted that ...
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General blog post

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 I've committed myself to taking a test this coming Saturday, for the General Class FCC Amateur Radio license.  I've been saying "Yeah, yeah, I'll get to it" for over a year, and finally, I'm going to do it.  I have to.  I clicked YES and paid my money.  Why am I doing it?  Peer pressure mainly.  Ernesto, a buddy in a couple of local radio clubs and I were talking one day a few months back, and he asked when I was going to get my General.  I hemmed and hawed and made up some weak excuses about antennas and such, and he told me something to the effect of "Man, you just need to get some wire and throw it up in the trees and along the fences.  That's all you really need to do HF radio."   It struck me, yeah, that's really all I need.  I don't need a $800 antenna from the UK with multiple elements and radials to reach out and communicate on HF, I just need some wire.  So I ordered a cheap end fed dipole antenna and started stu...
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Antenna Revisions

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Out with the old (Tram discone) and in with the new (Diamond D130J discone antenna).   I reconfigured the entire antenna "farm" and straightened it all out.  Essentially, I pulled it all down and put it on a folding table in my outdoor office - a table and a chair - and took it all apart.  This time, I used measuring tools and got the frame flat and square, and THEN started clamping antennas to it.  It looks better, and already I can tell on my Uniden BCD996P2 scanner it's much more sensitive - it has better 'ears!'  I'm picking up tower control at Georgetown Texas' airport, which I never heard before.   While I was looking around last night, I came across a video on the exact same situation I was having:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usiCGMU_dPQ  (FEPLabs Radio YouTube channel).  He ran SWR tests on the Tram and the Diamond and there is a significant delta in the signal quality compared between the 2 antennas.  I t...
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