AmateurRadio.com

A lot, if not most of you probably have Field Day plans for the weekend. Not me.

There are several clubs in the area that have operations going on, but none really super close. Marianne is working on Saturday, and I don’t want to go anyplace farther from home, while leaving the kids home alone.

So, if everything goes according to plan, I want to spend the afternoon putting down more radials for the Butternut. The goal is to get about a dozen to twenty more radials down, after mowing the lawn. That would give me a total of 36 to 46 radials total, depending on how many I get down.

The Butternut really plays well with the current 25 radials that I already have in place. Some more can only make things better.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

I know when summer is here when I have to keep on tweaking the tuning of my MFJ magnetic loop antenna throughout the day. Having an antenna farm in the attic (or loft as it is more commonly called over here) protects the antennas from the depredations of the elements but it does subject them to extremes of temperature during the summer months. As the loft warms up during the morning the metal of the magnetic loop expands. Because the magnetic loop is a very sharply tuned antenna this has an effect on the SWR. I don’t know what the temperature in the loft reaches on a sunny day but I wouldn’t want to go up there.

I’m not talking about a small change. I may tune the antenna to achieve a 1.2:1 SWR first thing in the morning and by lunchtime it can have increased to 2:1 or more. This wouldn’t be so noticeable if I was moving around the bands retuning as I go. But I use the magnetic loop for my 30m APRS station which stays on 10.1473MHz all day and every day. (It does a jolly good job there, by the way.) If I don’t pop into the shack now and again and give the antenna a quick tune I could be subjecting the transceiver to a higher SWR than is good for it.

The magnetic loop is the only antenna I have that will cover 30m, so I don’t have any alternative for my APRS system. This need for retuning affects all the bands I can use the loop on, not just 30m.

I suppose my multiband dipole also expands and contracts with temperature, but because the tuning is broader the effect on the SWR is less noticeable. Outdoor antennas have their tuning affected by rain or ice, of course, so I’m not alone in having to put up with weather effects on my antennas.

My Buddipole Antenna, Configured as a 2 Element Yagi for 6 Meters

The ribbons are to keep me from poking my eyes out on the end of the whips.

Here, I’m trying the antenna out in my driveway before I take it to the beach.

Kx3 QRP Radio 

Six Meter Summer!

This pavilion is my favorite operating spot at Hagen’s Cove. 

It overlooks Dead Man’s Bay, on the Gulf of Mexico in Perry Florida.

I’m going to spend the summer playing around with my Kx3 on 6 meters. The antenna here is a Buddipole, configured as a 2 element Yagi. Its easy to assemble in the field, so I’ll take it to the beach (Hagen’s Cove) and try to make some contacts with it. I’ve been a ham for 22 years but have never done much with 6 meters. This will be a 6 meter summer for me. Join me, I’d love to have a ham radio buddy to share the adventure with.

de AA1IK, 73

Today was a strange day.  It was my last day at my current job at Goldman Sachs. I’ve been there just over six years, managing all the Technology Department inventory (servers and networking and storage equipment) for the offices of the NY/NJ Campus.  I was the manager of the department responsible for receiving, inventorying, warehousing, and prepping for install a multi-billion dollar cache of equipment. I was also responsible for shipping re-purposed equipment both domestically and internationally. Believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve been tasked with shipping millions of dollars of used equipment to places like Seoul, Sao Paolo, and Kuala Lumpur, and you were told it had to arrived undamaged (even though the original shipping containers had since long been discarded) and it had to arrive “yesterday”. I can proudly attest that in the six years that I was there, my department oversaw that inventory with a shrinkage percentage (loss due to theft, damage or mis-shipping) of less than 0.001%.

Last summer, Goldman felt that they had too many vendors, so they decided to downsize the number that they have on board. Our contract was farmed out to another vendor, and while my team was RIF’ed (reduction in force) I stayed on for six months to basically teach my replacements how to do the job.  My actual employer is Pitney Bowes Management Services, and through them, I will be starting at a new, non-management (actually glad for that, for a change) position with IBM next week.

My co-workers, the other outside vendors (IPC, Scholes, EMC, CBRE) who also serve Goldman Sachs are the best.  Totally unexpected, I walked into work this morning to find this waiting for me on my desk.