It’s not going to win any beauty contests, but with my slapped-together Small Magnetic Loop Antenna (small MLA), I just worked two stations in the San Francisco Bay area with 20 Watts on FT8! (11pm CDT, 20-meters, antenna in living room.) By comparison, it takes me over 40 Watts to do the same on my […]
Category Archives: Amateur Radio
Rebalanced
Took out the drill and did repairs to my 1:1 and 4:1 baluns. Made the holes wide enough and at the 3/4″ centers necessary to accept the banana terminal blocks. Sealed the interface between the case and the block with a flattened piece of Coax-Seal(tm) for water protection. Looks better, and now the terminals won’t […]
1:0 Balun
Severe storms and winds this weekend prompted me to take down one of my two antennas for safety. I have a 20m inverted-V dipole with 1/4 wave 300Ω twinlead as the feedline from the center insulator to a 1:1 current balun mounted on my wall (the twinlead is transparent at 20m frequencies). The other antenna […]
S9+
Haha. Haha. Hah. Ah hah. Hah. It’s raining, and my 40m ham band reception at my apartment is S9+ across the entire f’n band. 20m is S6, and it’s currently dead at 11pm CT. And there are broadbanded birdies every 60KHz, some right on top of the FT8 subbands. And I even experimented with running […]
Receive-Only
So what do you do when your hobby no longer brings you joy? What then, when you stare at your materials on the desk and feel a pang of guilt about them still sitting there, undisturbed, gathering dust for weeks. What do you do to get out of the rut? How do you destroy expectations […]