ND2E's Blog

Lightning/power surge got me last Saturday. A freak thunderstorm (is there such a thing) struck and lightning hit somewhere nearby. There was no noticeable time lag between the bolt and the crash so I assume it was really close. The surge took out the power supply for the computer and who knows what else in the box as well as the serial control port on the Kenwood TS-2000.

I will be using my laptop as the station computer and will send the TS-2k back to Kenwood for repair shortly. In the mean time I will be upgrading the grounds and protection circuitry before putting the backup Yaesu 857 on line.

So today the chores were to knock a 4 inch hole in the concrete block garage wall and line it with a length of 4 inch PVC pipe. Tomorrow it is off to Lowes to pickup a NEMA box big enough to hide the bricks that spalled when I drilled the hole. I didn’t know brick was that hard.

Once I have the box bolted up, I need to bolt some sort of support for the several aerial runs of Heliax that needs to be run to the antenna farm. Then I can mount the ground bus and the surge protectors on the transmission lines. Hopefully I will have all of this done before the middle of August.

Of course, once I get these little chores done it will be winter and time to start on finishing the basement so I don’t really know when I will get a chance to operate before next summer.

It will all work out-eventually.

73 de ND2E

Finally getting back to Ham Radio things. I have the 2 meter J-pole up and the cabling is running across the lawn. The next chore is to run the final Heliax from the shack area to the garage wall, install the ground bus and the, install the arrestors, dig the trench, and install the final section of permanent transmission line. Not much-should get that done before Christmas.

All kidding aside, it looks like I should have that done before the end of August as I need to bring the HexBeam down to fix a couple of things I have noticed…it is facing SE when the rotator is pointing north, the last segment of line isn’t working well and is not properly coiled between the mast and the antenna. THe biggie however is the upper guys are not set properly and in a high wind will force the mast to rotate and the new slack will probably bring the mast down.

So in the next few days I will need to work on those problems. At the same time this  happpening, I need to play with the SGC coupler and see if that part of the experiment is going to work…that needs to be done before I close the trench. It starts to get complicated

73 de ND2E

I finally got a chance to raise the aluminum mast with the 2 meter j-pole on it. Again I am short good transmission line. I used a piece of RG-213 so I have around a 2 dB loss going to the antenna. That coupled with the short secction of LMR-240 and the piece of LMR-400 going up inside the mast I should have a bunch of loss.

So sometime in the near future I need to locate two pieces of Heliax and run them to the mast…underground this time because I don’t want to mow over them.

I have killed this blog thru inattention to what I was doing so I have had to rebuild not only the blog but the entire web site. Luckily I did do a backup of the site last Sunday. Unfortunately the Resources section was not part of the backup. I will have to rebuild that in the near future.