Mike Vandewalle, N8MTV, offered a helpful hand to put the finishing touches onto the hexbeam project last nite 5/23.
The missing 15m directive and reflective wire element had finally arrived from KIO Technologies and it was carefully installed on the spiderweb-like antenna after the whole antenna was unmounted from the tower and brought back to ground level.
Hex beam project getting real.
Mother’s Day was spent getting up a used K4KIO hex.
The good news: it unexpected included a 6m capability.
The bad news: it didn’t come with 15m wires.
Gary, KE5AMW, is a CW guy. He’s gotten me interested to sharpen my CW skills that have rusted over the years.
I confess– he’s also inspired me to finally learn how to use a CW mechanical Bug, something I’ve put off for years. I bought this off of eBay a long time ago, but never learned how to key it.
KG5HOK devised a cleverly simple u-bolt mounting scheme to get our temporary 50′ crackup tower up for operation.
It will live at the empty concrete slab until we can get the plans (and funds) in place to re-erect the 60′ full sized tower.
Updating this Blog subject,…
IC-781 HF transceiver now working fine (fingers crossed) so we’re back to 3x HF radios in the shack.
Insidious R20 fusible resistor kept tricking us into thinking there was a downstream failure embedded in the power line supply.
Turns out that Icom engineers very cleverly designed this inline resistor just below the edge of it’s power handling capacity.
