New QTH

Over this past summer my family and I have been looking at buying a house rather than continuing to rent. Well the house hunt became successful in late July/early August. My ham shack got packed up for the move. We moved into our new home in September and have been busy unpacking boxes.

Two weeks ago I finally got to the boxes with all of the ham shack radios and accessories. At this point I have the ham shack spread out on my desk. The Kenwood TM-D700A is now back up and operational for local VHF/UHF. I also now have the Igate running off that radio as well. The HF station is on the desk and awaiting the HF antennas to go up. I had intended to use my MFJ Window Pass through however have decided that I'm going to bring the coax cables into the ham shack without using it. When using it in the rental house I had a tough time sealing it in the window and the ham shack was always super cold in the winter. I will post photos and updates over the next several weeks as the ham shack comes together.

Photo of K7TYE Ham Shack desk as of 11/9/2014

New HF Antenna and 7QP

The last weekend in April provided just enough of a break in the wet and windy spring weather to put up a new HF antenna.  I built an 80 meter full wave horizontal loop antenna.  I have fed it with 450-ohm ladder line which I have never used before.  The ladder line goes into a 4:1 balun outside the shack and a short run of coax cable comes into the station.  Thanks to my friend James for climbing the trees and setting up the pulleys in the trees.  After about 4 hours of outside work the antenna went up successfully.

The 7th Call Area QSO party (7QP) occurred on May 4, 2014.  This was the first big test of the new antenna and it was very successful!  I didn't work the entire time the contest was running but I still managed to make 113 contacts throughout the day on 20, 40, and 80 meters.  The bands were wide open and even running 100 watts was able to have tons of fun.

I will be putting up pictures of the new antenna in the next couple of weeks.

Radio Notes: 10 Meter Fun Today

With a little luck and a bit of perseverance I managed to work two European stations on 10 meters today.  I was pleasantly surprised to add both Belgium (OT4A) and Poland (SP9LJD) to my logbook.  With the band being open in the morning my simple G5RV antenna and FT-897D running 100 watts is actually working, which at times I wondered if it was when it seemed no one could hear me.

Today I also had an "Ah ha!" moment with a setting on my Yaesu FT-897D.  I often wondered why stations sounded so, well, just plain bad on receive.  Even when band conditions were not the best I noticed that a lot of stations were hard to copy and their audio sounded like it was coming from a blown speaker.  While listening to a station today on 10 meters today the meter was pegged at 60dB over S9.  After a quick consultation with the manual I turned on the attenuation.  Magically the signal became almost crystal clear.  In fact I don't think I have ever heard audio sound so good on receive.  I tuned around the band listening to other stations and they all sounded great.  So my lesson learned was attenuation is a good thing and to not be afraid to use it.

Anyway that's my radio notes for today!

73
K7TYE

K7TYE APRS Weather Station Off-the-Air

The Lacrosse weather station has finally stopped connecting to the outside sensors.  At this point the APRS weather station will be off the air indefinitely.  The Crooked  River Ranch APRS Igate will remain on the air as of later today (12/28/2013).

Weather Station Update

The weather station has been reset and revived.  It is running however occasionally I lose connection with the outside sensors for a time then they reconnect.  At this time I have added the weather data back to my APRS station beacons.

APRS Weather Station Down

My Lacrosse Technology WS-2810u weather station had a major malfunction.  The wind sensor and main outside thermohygrometer stopped talking to the main inside unit.  After replacing batteries and resetting the sensors they still would not communicate.  After taking apart the anemometer it appears the reset button was not working.  It is now fixed and back together.  The station is inside and currently all sensors are connected. If they all stay connected while inside to night then tomorrow they will go back outside and should be back in full operation.

APRS.fi Screen Shot of Return Trip from California

Took a vacation to see family in the California Bay Area.  Even included a stop at Ham Radio Outlet Sunnyvale to look at all the new radios that have come out.  After returning home I pulled up the aprs.fi map of my track and have included a screen shot of it below.  Click on it to see the journey and thanks for everyone who maintains digipeaters and igates along the way that I used!