Got the bug!

I know I am way over due to be posting… sorry, just got too busy… well actually I got the bug… In my hobby of Amateur Radio – it comes in “chunks”.  When I get the “bug” then I lose site of other things… and I got the bug big time when I got home last… first had to get some antenna work done so I remembered the old”Grass Snake” that I built for the motor home 6 years ago… basically it is a run of RG-8X coax about 120ft long that you just roll out on the ground… it receives ok, and will transmit through a tuner but is not very efficient but – hey it works… once I got that out I grabbed the IC-706 from the motor home, and got it hooked up in the shack… got it tuned and made a contact on it… ‘it really does work”.  But once I got that bug I had to get my inverted V up so I set out to locate all the old wires and stuff and in a few days I had that up and the signals were better… all this caused me to start looking more seriously at some other things that i had wanted to do 8 years ago… digital (other than packet) on HF… so I ordered a Signalink usb to put on the Icom and got to work with HRD version 5 figuring some of it out and by the last week of home time I was on the air running PSK31… and all those other things… and I can tell you that was a kick… making phone contact on 80 in the evening, and during the day doing digital… but unfortunately all things change and I had to come back to work… leaving all that fun at home… now I focus is on getting a lot of little things planned out and some fixes on things I had ignored (radio wise) for some time… so in all my spare time now I am researching things like noise reduction, RF reduction (where you don’t want it)… etc… Also wanting to get a better tower up so I can add a beam for the above 50mhz  SSB stuff I have always wanted to get active in… I put up my little halo antennas but didn’t find much to work on them… but didn’t spend much time there as i was too busy on HF … great time…