Junk, continued. A couple of months ago, I wrote about the importance of junk in amateur radio. Well, here’s another example.
Last week, my friend, Ralph, AA8RK, acquired a used TS-850. Unfortunately, it didn’t have a power cable, so he sent a message to our club e-mail list asking if anyone had a cable he could buy from them. It struck me that while I didn’t have a cable that I wanted to sell him, I did have all the parts needed to make one. For some reason a year or so ago, I happened to purchase the Molex connector at a hamfest, and at Dayton this year, I purchased more 12-ga., two-conductor wire and a big bag of PowerPole connectors.
Ralph came over Monday night, and we had a fine time making the connector and talking about ham radio in general. Ham radio is more fun if you have the right junk!
Horse-fence antenna revisited. One of the things that Ralph and I talked about was my horse-fence antenna. I was unsuccessful with my first attempt at making a 2m dipole with the horse-fence material and just haven’t had the motivation to get back to working on it. Well, when I showed it to Ralph, he said, “It looks to me like you have a bunch of little capacitors there,” referring to the 14 very fine stainless steel wires running through the plastic ribbon, “maybe that’s detuning it.”
I think he might be right. I’m going to go get a couple more clamps and clamp the far end of the antenna elements and see what effect that has.
Jamboree on the Air (JOTA) 2012. Almost two weeks ago now, we had a great Jamboree on the Air at WA2HOM. On Saturday, we had eight or ten Scouts. Several of them already had their General Class licenses, so all I had to do was sit them down at the radio, show them how to use the controls, and they were off to the races. They even worked a new country for us – Trinidad. The cool thing was that the station they contacted down there was also participating in the JOTA, and they got to talk to some Trinidadian Scouts.
Sandy quiets the bands. On Tuesday night, the 40m band was oddly quiet as hurricane Sandy took out the power on the East Coast and otherwise occupied hams there. It was quite noticeable that there were a lot fewer stations on the air.
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