Kent's Ramblings

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...

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 ...

 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...

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...

I'm mid-way through building a new antenna setup in the backyard.  Note my Comet GP-1, and I used some EMT thinwall conduit to build outriggers to mount my Tram discone antenna for scanning, and on the other side is my Flight Aware 1090 MHz ADS-B antenna for gathering info on aircraft in flight within about 50 NM of my QTH.  Look at that!  I'm using ham radio slang!!     The only issue I'm having is that the Tram discone sorta sucks.  So much so that I bought a new discone from Diamond Antenna from HRO yesterday, and it arrived tonight.  I wasn't going to buy anything until I finished doing my income taxes, and that happened around 5:30pm tonight, and the new antenna arrived at 7pm, so I guess I didn't break my own rule!  😐   Why did I buy a new discone?  Well, I love listening to radio comms, and to be honest, that Tram sucks.  I dialed up 119.000MHz on my Yaesu 991, and was listening to a few aircraft talking to the tower at KAUS...