I know you are probably getting tired of reading about our adventures at the museum, but since I’m using this blog partly to document my ham radio activities, I guess you’ll just have to put up with me. :)
Here’s the update:
- Tower project. A week and a half ago we met with the museum folks about putting up a tower on the roof. (You may recall that the ARRL Foundation granted us $3,000 for the project.) The upshot of this meeting was that we decided on which tower to purchase (a 30-ft. Universal Tower) and where to locate the tower on the roof. Our next step is to get a city building inspector over to the museum and educate us about grounding requirements.
In addition to the tri-bander that’s been graciously pledged to the project, we’ve also been given a 2m vertical antenna.
I’m still hoping that we can complete this project by the end of the summer.
- Operating. We continue to operate the station two or three times per week. Last Saturday, we made a bunch of contacts in the 7th Call District QSO Party, working all of the states in that district except for Wyoming.
Jim, K8ELR, continues to work a lot of 20m PSK31, and has racked up quite a few DX contacts. Now, we need to get our Logbook of the World account squared away and send off for some paper QSL to bolster our QSL card display.
- New Modes. James, W8ISS, has been coming down to the museum regularly. One week, he brought in his ATV gear, and we set up an ATV demo.
Last week, he brought in an old Kenwood TS-520. The receiver seemed to be working OK, but alas, the rig didn’t want to transmit.
After testing out the rig, we started talking about how we could make ATV a more permanent part of our operations. We discussed how to mount the camera and perhaps putting a monitor down in the lobby to draw people up to the station.
James suggested that we purchase the VM-70X video transmitter module from P.C. Electronics. I’m going to be purchasing this module today with the donations I collected from our last one-day Tech class and the sale of a 2m radio, which had been donated by the family of a Silent Key.
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