ND2E's Blog

I don’t know if anyone reads this blog but I have turned the comments back on. If I start getting Spam here I will turn the comments off again…I really don’t want to do that.

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Hexbeam

Well, it has happened again. The winter winds came and the HexBeam went. During the summer I performed some repairs to the antenna because it had come loose from the rotator … the center shaft had been eaten by the teeth of the rotator clamp. I repaired the problem area by epoxiying a bit of aluminum to the affected areas hoping that that would reduce the wear until a proper fix could be made next summer.

The fix evidently worked well, The antenna stayed in place and rotated properly for several months. It even survived several high wind events. But last week, the high winter winds took their toll and the center shaft failed.

When I did the repair, I forgot about the loss of strength that the fiberglass center shaft tubing suffered when the teeth notched the shaft. The wind bit hard and the shaft sheared where the teeth had been. The epoxy paste I used did not provide sufficient strength to prevent the catastrophic failure of the center shaft even though it was strong enough to prevent rotation.

The antenna is now on the ground with yet another broken limb and a broken center shaft.

I will rebuild come Spring, but until then I will be using my 35 foot vertical as well as my NVIS 40M hamstick dipole.

Although this is yet another chapter in the ongoing saga of how not to build a fiberglass-based antenna, there are many lessons to be learned. And I am sure that there will be many more. The most important one that I have learned so far is: DON’T USE A FIBERGLASS MAST WITHOUT USING SOME SORT OF ARMOR! The next center shaft I build for the antenna will be aluminum tube over the fiberglass tube. Not only will this save wear and tear on the rotator clamping area but will also be a good clamp base where the limb baseplate mates with the center shaft.

I intend to do a full rebuild on the antenna and possibly add a 6M section. I also want to revisit the mast and its erection/mounting method. As currently configured, the antenna must be lifted vertically over 10 feet and placed in the rotator clamp. I had used a very primitive ginpole to handle this as well as the extension of the pushup mast. I is exceedingly difficult for me and the XYL to handle this task. I originally had the help of a local Ham but I really hate to keep bumming help when there should be an engineering solution to the problem.

So, during the rebuild, I will try to build some sort of tilt-over mechanism for the mast so I can mount the antenna with everything on the ground. I also want to find a way to mechanize the extension of the pushup pole once the antenna is mounted. If I am successful with the mast revisions, I will be able to bring the antenna down when High winds are expected and possibly not have to rebuild the antenna again.

I finished the new computers and was facing the confusion of having 2 mice, 2 keyboards and 2 displays. The conventional solution to this kind of problem is to add a KVM switch and use one keyboard. KVMs are relatively inexpensive if you only need 2 computer ports. But if you are going to go beyond 2 ports you need the expensive variety of KVMs.

Either way it is still an expense and I had just built 2 new computers and purchased a new 24 inch display for one of the computers. I needed a cheap inexpensive means of switching the keyboard and mouse between computers.

I found a piece of software, Synergy+, that allows the sharing without the need for hardware.

I installed it last night and find it is a convenient. Even-though it is still beta, I haven’t noticed any bugs. It must be installed and set up on each of the machines. It is not difficult to set up but the instructions are a bit obscure.

I also use Logmein Free to run the K3 when I don’t want to be in the basement. It is very useful on digital modes where you don’t need to hear the audio. I can also use it with HRD decoding CW since I don’t copy CW very well and I really don’t need to hear the audio (but I should be listening so my proficiency increases.)

For the past few weeks I have been assembling new household computers. For the past year I have been using an older Dell Dimension GX-Series as the main computer for radio and web development. It is an old-style Socket 478 Pentium running at 2+ GHz. HRD and background tasks often ran the machine into the 100% realm and HRD’s performance suffered. However I had not planned on upgrading machines or even replacing the machine since I could use my Dell Studio laptop for web development and for the radio.

I also do some video editing for our local congregation so that the weekly sermon is available on the church web site. In doing the weekly edits, I found that even the Studio with its T6500 2.1 GHz processor was not really as fast as I wanted. It was taking too long to create the clip I needed. So, I needed ; ) a faster machine.

I opted to build a new Socket 775 machine with a 2.9 GHz Pentium Dual-Core (E6500) processor using a 32-bit XP operating system. The machine worked very well and cut the time down to a more reasonable area but I figured I could do better if I overclocked the CPU. That worked, the time was cut down to roughly 75 minutes to load the .VODs and another 90 to write the final clip. This was more reasonable but still not fast enough to get things done on a Sunday afternoon after church. 165 minutes was still better than I had been doing with the Studio laptop but it was still too long.

After using the new computer for a couple of weeks, I decided to investigate replacing the Pentium with a Quad. What could I expect in performance gains if I moved to a Quad? And which Quad would be a better choice? I searched and researched the available 775 Quads and determined that the best would be a Q9550 but the best price I could find was more than I really wanted to pay. My second choice was the Q8400 but it was a 2.55 GHz chip – slower than the E6500 so many tasks other than video editing would suffer and run at roughly 85% of what I had grown used to.

I still don’t know if HRD is multi-processor aware but I did find that many hardware hackers had pushed the Q8400 to 3.4 Gz with little problem other than heat. If my chosen motherboard could handle overclocking the Q8400 to roughly 3 GHz without problems, I would not suffer any execution slowdowns. I tested the overclock capabilities of the MB by setting the overclocking on automatic and going for a 15% OC on the E6500. That worked so I knew that the MB could provide some OC capabilities for the new processor.

All that remained was the heat issue. The E6500, when OCed to 3.2 GHz during a video creation would hit 61 Degrees C. Not really good but under the 70 deg C limit for the processor. That was for a 65 Watt cpu, what would happen when I put a 95 Watt cpu under the same load. Would it break the 70 degree mark? Being chicken, I opted for a non-stock cooler for the quad. I chose a massive cooler that was supposed to be able to handle a 130 Watt cpu at full load. I figured that the OCed quad would be hitting about 130 to 150 watts at full load so the cooler would probably work. It does…under 90% load at 3.1 GHz, the cpu never gets over 42 degrees C. The new processor and DDR3 memory cuts the overall load and create time to roughly 1.5 hours and normal tasks work at roughly the same speed as with the E6500.

So what does this mean to the old 478 Pentium machine? It means that I now have a spare E6500 and memory. I need a MB, case, and power supply to create a fast machine for the radio. I purchased a less expensive case, bought another MB like the first one, and bought a new 500W PS. I reused a CD burner and hard drive I had from an earlier machine so I basically got by with only having to buy the case, MB, and PS to create the new machine. In both instances I used mATX MB so I didn’t have to buy expensive Radeon display boards. I can add them later if I find I need to upgrade the video.

Yesterday I finished the radio machine except for a new after-market cooler which should be in today. It works well and doesn’t slow down when other tasks are running.

It has been a long dry summer, I design and build Joomla-based web sites for several organizations. I am really quite new at web site design and operation so it should not be a shock when one of the sites was hacked. It has taken me a long time to understand how it was done and what was needed to slow down the attacks. The version of Joomla that I was using was really easy to hack, as was this blog. So to cut down on things I was forced to turn off comments and do several things that made several sites less useful. I am slowly returning things to normal after rebuilding, modifying, and adding security to the sites. The web security activities have not left me with much time to do Ham radio things.

I was able to work Field Day from home. I think I did better this year than the last two years. Hopefully I have learned a bit and become a better operator.

Just before Field Day I noticed that my hexbeam was not looking right. It was slouching off at a strange angle and the beam was not facing the same direction as the rotator. I managed to get through Field Day without everything falling down but my main antenna definitely needed a lot of work.

So this month I have made it a priority to get the radio things in order for the winter season.

I lowered the antenna and found that the fiberglass mast I was using had been eaten by the mast clamps on the rotator. I had expected a bit of wear but the clamps had removed enough material that the antenna was almost falling out of the rotator.

I modified the clamps and mast by epoxying an aluminum protective skin to the clamping surface. I also shimmed the spider to the mast and epoxied it in place.

So far the modifications seem to work. We have gone through one major wind storm and the antenna stayed facing the proper direction and there was no apparent wind forced movement of the various parts. Hopefully, that will solve the problem for a couple of years. I expect that the antenna will need to be rebuilt in a couple of years but until then I think it will survive.

There has been some recent solar activity and there is a chance that the higher bands will come back this coming year. Thinking that 6meters might be a useful band again, I built a 6meter dipole to be added to the short mast that carries my NVIS 40meter hamstick dipole.

I also want to finally get my 40ish foot vertical working in time for this winter. I had been using that aluminum mast as the 2m/70cm mast for the J-pole. I was having doubts that the vertical and the J-pole could co-exist without putting a lot of RF back on one or the other of the feed lines, so the J-pole had to come down.

The solution was to get my four-band mobile vertical out of storage and mount it on top of the short mast. I knew that the 2m/70cm sections would work as they were complete antennas but suspected that the 6 and 10meter sections would not be really effective since they were 1/4-wave sections. I was hoping that the 20ish foot mast would be enough of a ground for the 6- and 10meter sections to be somewhat useful but knowing that I had 10-meters available on the Hexbeam and a new 6-meter dipole gave be a chance to play with the verticals. I am running out of feed lines to the antenna farm so I put the 6meter and 40meter dipoles on the same feed with no attempt to phase them. So far both tune up well using the autotuner in the K3.

The aluminum vertical is now up but has no feed lines and the SGC coupler has not been mounted nor have the radials been run. If we have a couple of sunny days, I will get that done before the winter rains start.

Hopefully, all the antennas will survive the winter and I will have time to play with the radio.