New antennas, operating desk improvements, stuff you’re fixing, mobile installs, any little or big thing amateur radio related you've been working on lately.

This is a bulkhead patch panel I’ve been working on this week. Originally it started out as a 5 connector but I found I could cram 8 in. Wish I’d stuck to the original plan but it works. The connectors are the solder type on the back. I’ll bring 8 pieces of RG-400 in from the antenna box outside along with a one continuous piece of 1” copper braid that comes thru the slot in the bottom.

Tried out a new antenna last night, but HF conditions were very poor - so I didn't learn much.
53ft wire to a 9:1 UnUn with a 25ft counterpoise. Tunes up very easily from 80m-10m. More testing in the near future..

I built the same thing A Rybakov  but I used a 4:1 unun per the plans with a 33' counterpoise and a 53' wire. I worked 52 contacts in an hour on a POTA activation a few weeks ago. Hard to tell from the pic but there is a flag pole hitch with a 32’ Jackite pole and the wire slopes down to the palm tree. I ran the counterpoise around the vehicle and clipped it to the tailpipe. I put my LDG tuner 3’ from the unun and a 1:1 cm choke after that.

Bought an mfj tuner for an upcoming camping/pota/vhf contest. Tested that out last night to make sure everything was on the up and up
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And the approximate location of the campsite. We will setup a bit away from the power lines. Hopefully the abundance of FAA towers and cell sites on top of the mountain don't effect propagation

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At home, I'd like to put in a patch panel in the wall.  Wallplates already drilled/stuffed with connectors (4 N, 2 BNC, 2 F).  Eventually get a decent entry panel outside.  Ground rod's been hanging out there for about a year now, one of these days i'll pound that in (once I figure out where the staircase on the deck is going...).  

Entire office area needs remodel though, big project that probably won't happen this year.  (Guest and 3rd bedroom remodels, front yard reseed/irrigation, landscape lighting...)

May end up with a new radio in the next month or so, probably a VP8000.  

Otherwise it's the usual tower stuff, site service, installs, training, etc etc.  Climbing season "officially" started this week.

Got in a Doppler like kit to mess around direction finding. Friday is the assemble day

The aluminum disc that holds my radials has come apart at the bend where the so239 is connected. Looks ok at the spots the radials connect. I have some AL strap and angle, so I am going to try for a repair. Will get pics.

Here are the remains of the ground plate. There is a missing 90 degree angle and an inch or so of aluminum. It only seems to be at the feed line where it occurred. I am going to send pics to DX Commander and see what they say.
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I have managed to find a few Raspberry Pi boards and completed another hotspot for DMR. The board above is a Raspberry Pi 3A+ and a MMDVM hat with OLED screen.

Soldering the 40 pin headers is a cinch now since my cataract surgery. Having 20/20 vision again is a blessing.

Man that is nasty!

See this post:

https://www.ar15.com/forums/outdoors/Alternative-to-DX-Engineering-radial-plate-/22-705055/&r=12098436&dlnk=1#i12098436

Looks like some plasti-dip is in my future. I have some angle and strap cut, just need to borrow a vise and drill press to get it finished.
I have also considered making it out of stainless steel instead.

Plastidip won't work. It's not hermetic. It can even make it worse by holding moisture close to the bare aluminum. Conversion coating the aluminum is the way to go. That's why they do that before painting aluminum aircraft components because even the paint is not good enough by itself.

Of course this is not aviation, and anything you do to protect the aluminum is probably better than nothing.

Stainless would be top tier.

wow. That's some serious corrosion. Gonna have to see if the plate I bought was stainless or aluminum.

I heard back from Callum, and he has never seen anything like that. He immediately volunteered to send a couple of replacements, in case it happens again. I am going to remove the mulch, and replace with stone, and put some kind of barrier between the concrete and the plate.
I also discovered that the bottom of the mfj 10m pole is the same as the DX commander, at least the one I have is. I may make a second one for portable use. Might take 15 min to set up, but they work really well with low power radios.
A 6" aluminum disc on eaby can be had for cheap. Use one of those for the element side, and a 4" for the radials. 3 cutting boards from the dollar store will make the spreaders.

I have an ft891, tuner, skyloop 2.0 and EVERYTHING I need to get it setup and on the air. Still sitting in a box from 2021.

I'm back up and running, but no pics of the repair. It's pretty ugly. I an going to have to trim a couple of elements, seems they were stretched over the winter with all the wind and pole flexing.

Don't get too excited, they're not connected to anything in the back either.


>need a 4.5"-to-2" pipe-to-pipe mount
>oh and it needs 30° down-tilt
>vendor 1: "Lmao."
>vendor 2: "Lol!"
fine then






it doesn't count because it's not ham

Two big projects in the works.

Got the parts on the way to upgrade an antenna.

Right now I've got a $13 mobile antenna of Amazon (Baofeng is top shelf compared to this  ) magneted to my metal roof feeding a Yeasu FTM-7250.  Does a good job, but it's, well, $13.  

Going to replace that with a Comet DS150S discone. Will also be installing a switch and a duplexer so I can split the 6m off my FT-891 to the discone without baking the dual-band by accident.  

Next step after that is to put an MFJ-1708 on the antenna feed and hook up my scanner to it.  One antenna, three systems.  A little complicated, but I have limited real estate for antennas. (I'm calling my roofline the Highlander--"There can be only one!")

In the process I'm moving my 40m EFHW from the current attach point to the roofline (about 12' up on the gutter) to the peak where the discone is going to be attached.  Should give me about another 20' in altitude at the feed point, so 35' dropping down to about 10'.

Biggest issue is I've got a 28 degree slope on a metal roof.  Wishing really hard either of my younger, braver sons were here to do it for me....

I've been working on building out a 10M/11M station, part of the CB stuff I've been exploring lately.

I'll probably do a separate posting soon, but will say FM with DCS on CB and the right antennas
really changes the experience and usability a lot, and has made me re-think local comms.

Also a tangent, as part of what I've been doing I've been testing various CB/10M antennas, and
ended up doing some software and calibrating a rtl-sdr to provide an accurate measure of channel
energy in dBm to do comparisons. A couple things rose out of that:

One, the gain claims on CB antennas put ham antennas to shame. The best performing antenna I've
tested so far is in fact an end-fed half wave in a vertical configuration that's about 20 feet tall.
This is sold as a 10dBi antenna, e.g. better than a yagi and described as a "1/2 wave over 1/4 wave."
It's 2dBi gain like any other halfwave.

The other is that at my QTH I'm seeing -53dBm signals in the afternoon around channel 6. Now, that's a
pretty strong signal even for a local transmission, but these are NOT local stations. Based on the discussion
they're either central California or Louisiana. The free space path loss from my QTH to Cali is 123 db, and
to Lousiana is 128 db. Working backwards from that means the stations have an ERP of -53+123 or +128,
which is 70 to 75dBm. Translated into watts -- that's an ERP of 10,000 watts to 32,000 watts, and that's assuming
a perfect path (but also no gain antennas.) Even the most generous assumptions (famous CBer with a
16 dBi, 16-element yagi in Cali) puts the TX power well into the 100s of watts, and again assumes perfect
path transmission. That people can run more power on CB than FM broadcast stations just blows my mind,
not just getting away with it but the investment to do so has to make legal limit amateur amplifiers look like child's play.

Now for pics! I didn't have it in me to dig rock for another vertical, and wanted to have a better platform to
test with, so I made a "portable" (it's 80lbs) antenna base for the EFHW on 10/11M. Concrete in a bucket
along with a camoflaged EFHW vertical (I'll need to paint the bucket, I thought fluid film would work as
a release agent but no, it's not coming off without cutting.)

Base showing the pass-through (btw, has anyone priced 1-1/4 galvanized pipe lately? It's insane!)

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Fit test, with the EFHW about to be mounted:

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Final setup ready to go, the antenna camo makes it literally disappear in the forest, I have to look
even 15 feet away:

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I drive a stake in the ground, and slide my pole over that. It holds the end of my efhw that slopes down to the transformer. Screw that bucket full of cement.
Edit: missed the rock in the way of drilling a stake in. Paint the bucket with that granite paint, and dust to match local rocks.

Probably paint the bucket brown like the antenna, with some light tan and green flecks to match the weeds in the area,
on the antenna I put some patches of green and grey stripes like oak bark just here and there.

I didn't expect the antenna camo to work out as well as it did, it really is shocking when something disappears
and you know exactly where it is and are looking right at it. Now I'm thinking I should repaint the 43' to match.

Passed General last night, 34/35.  Does that count?

Fired up my radio and amp for the first time in a while. Need to troubleshoot a weird issue; ~30w barefoot is fine. ~30w through the amp (amp driven with 5w) results in a high SWR with two antennas, but perfectly fine with the dummy load.

I probably just need to get on the radio more.

Congrats! I would consider passing general a project.

I didn't make this battery box. It was $40 from i think AutoZone, I printed the power pole housings and put them in.

It has 4 round double power pole housings for a total of 8 power pole connections.

I also took out the cig lighter adapter and put in a 100 amp master switch and a 60 amp fuse.

In it is a 100 Ahr LiFePO4 battery.

I use it for portable ops and for an electric motor on my Nucanoe kayak.

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I got an antenna base concreted in and I just need to get time to do the busy work now of installing my cable run and radials, then assemble and tune the antenna.  The sagebrush in the background is in the way of the radials so I am going to have to cut it out of the way as well.  There is a lot more of the stuff to the sides and behind out of view.  

I also have some gardening to do with the wife that has to come first.

Been working on figuring out how to perform firmware updates to EFJ 5100 and 5300 series radios as I want to update a UHF 5300 I have so I can run PCConfig 2.18.6 instead of 2.14.6. The only thing the update will add is functionality to option a Viking control head.

Modified my XTS keyload adapter to work with EFJ 5100 and first gen Viking portables as well as the XTS radios. Adapted an EFJ SMA keyload adapter for second and third gen Viking radios into a KPG-93 keyload adapter so it can work with the standard 3WI interface instead of RS-232 like the SMA uses. Started working on modifying EFJ "Standard" control head keyload adapter for the SMA over to a 3WI.

Learning how to use Microsoft Visual Studio to build SDR software from source code:

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God help you!  I fired up VS about a month ago in a kvm to build MMDVMHost for windows.  It actually worked, I was happy.  I hooked up my usb connected ftdi MMDVM modem and was able to connect to TGIF.  I used VS for about a year and a half many moons ago.  It's to me.

so are adding features to Thetis?

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Slow going.  I am out of shape!

Not me! I'm just learning how to be on the hairy edge of development. I know enough to be dangerous

I can:

- clone a GitHub repo
- update (pull) from a GitHub repo
- keep multiple local repo's so I can have different versions available to build
- figure out dependencies from error messages and fix them (e.g. you need WiX v3 installed in VS)
- build and know where the results are and how to use them to run Thetis
- build an installer (it's already part of the codebase and therefore automagic as long as you have the Microsoft VS installer extension installed).

But I can't do anything significant to the code. My software skills are ancient and inapplicable. If it was written in assembly language, maybe

I am jealous of your having actual dirt instead of the rock I have.

Aw. Man!  Don't you have a tractor?

Fuck all of that.  Rent a trencher from home depot for a couple hours and be done with the job tonight.

Last week... always chuckle when I'm up close and personal with the "tiny lights at the top of the tower".  They're a lot bigger than you expect.


Bird damage to ether cabling

Haha that's only the first 40 feet or so.  The previous owner brought in 2 feet of dirt to garden in.  Once I get outside the fence I have an 80 foot run where it's a lot more rocky.  There is some dirt for sure, but I will probably have some stretches where I have to just pile dirt and rocks on top of the conduit because I can't go below the surface.  

This is typical of the boulders in the dirt here.  The red rocks to the right are leftover decorative rocks from previous owners.  

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Previous owner rented a jackhammer to run some gutter pipes underground.  There are little piles of softball sized rocks everywhere from that operation.

But I can dig here and there.  I just need a mattock to do it once I get into the really hard, compacted stuff.

After trenching the first bit, I decided I never wanted to do this again so I went to town and bought 120 feet of conduit.

No sir.  I wish I did.  But I can't justify the expense.  I make do with my ATV for stuff like plowing and hauling things around the yard.

Heh that's what my FIL says, but I can use the exercise.  When I dug the hole for the concrete base, my smart watch said I hit my calorie goal for the day.  That doesn't happen often.

My back yard is mostly mine overburden with dirt thrown on top. Golf ball sized to fuck that, I will dig elsewhere.

Haha that's pretty bad.  I have my trenching pretty much finished and I started cementing the conduit together this afternoon.  But it's thundering outside now so I had to stop.  I've been running a braided nylon mason line inside the tubes to use to pull the coax, but I might switch over to 550 cord because even at 40 feet there is already a few pounds of drag on the line. I really don't want to have it fail and have nothing in the pipe to pull with.

Finally updated laptop to Windows 10, upgrade WSJTX, made a couple qsos on FT8.
Going to figure out WSPR this week, so I can do some antenna comparison.

I did run into this beast.

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It's bigger than it looks in the pictures.  But it was right smack in the middle of my conduit path.  I'm going to get a breaker bar out of the garage and try to roll it out of the way.  This is the last really bad obstacle.  I've already got the first 40 feet in out to the antenna.

@Mach

I got one of those too.  Do you use the 50amp powerpoles?

I'm not kicking you, but that looks like movie dirt.  Our dirt grows stuff well, but it comes up in large clods.

I would be using a subsoiler to make that trench, but it would be 2' wide in places because of the large clods.

Ever been out west?  You don't just grab a shovel and dig a few feet down into the red clay.

Try living in the Granite State. It's not unusual for people there to have to truck-in fill in order to have something they can actually dig into

Or, if you have the option, and the money, to have the granite ledge blasted so a house can actually have a basement or even foundation. Because there's no machine they can bring in that will touch the stuff.

Living on solid rock can definitely be challenging no matter where you are!

Not yet, but I bought some to go on my trolling motor wires instead of using the wire thumb screw attachments on it made for trolling motors, I just haven't got around to putting the 50 Amp power pole connections on my trolling motor wires yet.

One of my CO properties is backed up to some granite features...I have a couple of T-posts just vertically standing on top of rocks because I didn't feel like boring and creting them in at the time (didn't know if I was going to end up moving the wire or not). Mullies don't tear that fence up like they do the perimeter fence though.