No I don’t mean Football, or hunting (although I am hunting in a way), or harvests or anything like that. It is that time of year to do repairs and fixes on antennas to make sure you have what you need when it gets cold out and you want to radio, right? So I have been tinkering with mine all summer, but now I am in the test and see and test some more… and I got a lightening strike that nearly wiped me out a few months ago so I figures I should revisit all my antennas, get some more protection in place and be prepared for “COLD” weather operation… First up is I finished up the 160 meter loop and have been testing it out lately… it hears fine… but my TX is not as good as I had expected. I hear signals a lot better on the little mag loop, which is not a bad things since I am low power, digital. Better to hear a lot and get some than not hear at all and be heard everywhere. We are not broadcast stations that are all talk and no listen.
Mainly because it has a much better SNR. I live in an area of moderately high noise… near city, multiple high power lines in the area and plasma TVs… ( I have one but it is not my worst noise here).
In the past weeks of testing to ensure all my damage was fixed… I had tested my 160 meter Carolina Windom… it tested out ok, what can get burnt up except the wires and they all appeared fine? Although it would tune on 80 and above it would not tune on 160 meters? Strange as it had worked fine there last winter… so today I set out to double check all the ends, and what I could before I was forced to let the tower down to replace some other “burnt” stuff and replace all the coax (it was all old anyway and now possible that it was much worse). I had not actually checked the ends as they appears up, tight, ok like before… but better do it anyway… well this is why every-once-in-awhile you should check things out a bit closer…
a twig from the tree, fell just right into the insulator and shorted out about 15 ft. of the long end of the windom or caused it to look different… anyway as small as that was, taking it out allowed the tuner to full tune on 160 meters and all is right with the world for that antennas now. Whew, I thought I had another burnt up antenna that was yet to be replaced and running out of prime replacement time…
The bands were a bit better this afternoon as I was needing to retest the Windom antennas and found that 15 meters was doing well on JT65… so I had to stop and partake of a few before moving on to another project.
Like I need another hobby, I always get the interest to check out old cars, car shows and stuff like that and unknown to me – I don’t take the local paper anymore and they do not advertise well to the general public – the local 20th annual antique/classic car show was at the old Ron Shirley dealership spot… that has been bought out by Wilson’s but I am glad to see that Wilsons did sponsor the show and has a nice showing. Actually there were more cars there this year than I had seen in years past… We stopped for a bit, made the walk around, saw a lot of the same cars we have seen before but a few new ones and some from Texas… That is another hobby I might enjoy but not sure I can spring for the costs of buying or rebuilding some old relic… but sure looks like fun…
This one had a nice paint and redone interior with Air conditioning… that would be a nice ride..
a Pink T-bird? and ugly pink at that?
Although it would be a toss-up (like in your cookies), with this green version?
Now this green is nice as the re-do was even better with all the amenities… good ride here..
While I was checking the antennas I also got a picture of the flowers that came up in the south bed… I think I had an old packet of seeds so just sprinkled them around in that bed around the pepper plants and they sure popped out…
It is also that time of the year for my little Japanese pines… they sure are prolific cone trees… they come in bunches like grapes or bananas?
So more radio, eating left over from yesterday … oh forgot the picture.. we stopped that Rocky Mountain Grill in Edmond for lunch and this time I decided to try the other “green chili” special… smothered chicken fried steak? that was a new one on me and it is laid out on a bed of refried beans… the beans were damn spicy and the chicken fry seemed the same but was a good piece of meat, just not sure I can break over to this way of fixing chicken fried steak… but was enough to bring home a second meal…
WD0AJG