Started my day with a quick run in for breakfast… wasn’t going to tackle that hard boiled egg and had about all the breakfast bars I wanted for this week… So I got a Breakfast Burrito at braums. I also was not totally up for doing much more to the project wall… the concrete mixing and the other few things I did had me wore out. Nice thing about retired, is that if I don’t want to … I don’t… I got back from my quick trip out and spent some time working on a few antenna changes in hopes of changing my luck with a few hams to the north east… I think they may be a bit too close for the antennas I am running ? But I gave it a shot.
First up I had to make some new jumpers for the old connection split board I had way back in the 80’s…
Yep, I saved that board and pulled it out when I was cleaning the other day so , maybe I will pull out the homebrew ladder line? and set up a similar set of antennas? but for this experiment I only have the 160 meter dipole up with the ladder line… the idea is that each leg of that dipole would be a random wire antenna with, ? maybe? some directivity on the lower bands… so far it hasn’t really worked that way but needs a lot more testing as the bands (10 meter) is really sporadic…
This old system started as a simple 80 meter inverted V with a dentron super tuner to put it on all the other bands… I wanted to work on 160 meter and the 80 meter V was a bit short for that , it would tune but was horrible at both TX and RX. I then played with the idea of putting up a sloper, back then I had a nice 65 ft. tower with a big tri-bander on top… since I had a part of it already and if I made my feedline a part of the antenna I would have a really close to 125 ft. of wire up the tower and back out and down to a suitable spot in my then small city lot… but if I could do one, then why not 4? The CATV line would be shielded all the way from in the house outside and then I would bury about 5 feet of it over to the tower and come up at a point 30 inches out from the tower… from there I would build the box ladder line, approximate 3 inches on a side, to run up the tower… using Plexiglas for the spreaders I built that 60 feet of antenna line and made some angle iron holders to mount cedar 1×4 boards on to hold it out away and steady from the tower… The tri-bander and set of 2meter beam on top made a good capacitive hat for this set up… From the board above I have 3 hook up point to the tuner. single random wire, or two tuned lines… I also had a ground wire that came in with the 4 CATV lines and used that to ground out the opposite side or 3 lines depending on the direction I wanted to aim my signals… anyway it worked like a champ and I was able to work all states on 160 meters SSB… I still have the cards from that but didn’t get a picture of the tower or the setup back then…
Anyway to day I wanted to test the dipole legs a random wire antennas and see what they could hear and or talk to… I got the jumpers made to connect it all up, and then moved one of the dipole legs further to the south for this test, as I needed it to be as closely opposite of the other leg as possible and to aim more directly East. In the process of moving the end of the dipole I upset the local bird population… got dive bombed once but we all survived that and I didn’t move or disturb any of the nests… I hope…
So far I am sure the single random wire may work about as good as the dipole but having any directivity is very debatable… But as before the condition of 10 meters is such that it will take a lot more testing to see how this comes out… but fixed this way it is easily put back to a dipole with a swap of a few jumpers… and a small retune of that old tuner… so today was a Ham radio day , most of it…
I did take a lunch break and went down to an old favorite… this place was in the same spot back in 1970… and I used to go there to get $0.25 hotdogs and play the pinball machines… yep… back then it was lined with pinball machines all the way around…
Today I opted for the onion burger special… about $6…
And back in the day… that wall was lined and on the very left side was a baseball machine that I played the most, cause for some odd reason, I could actually do well on it… never was any good at baseball but I could win a few free games on that machine nearly every time I played it… The walk down history lane…
I made a run to pick up some pet supplies after my burger and got that all home and back to work on the antenna project…
Also, for some odd reason this is the first time in ????? we didn’t get any mail? usually there is some junk in the box but nothing there today… what a relief… no bills and no junk…
WD0AJG