Chapter 2

2 April 2006

...And there it sat until today. Today I actually set the thing up and flipped the switch. The antenna I used is an interesting story.

Antenna gurus note: The following is not for the faint of heart! Do not crucify N3OYA for the following idiocy!

It was a beautiful day, not too warm, but clear skies. So I started rooting through my Junque Boxe for bits to make an antenna. I know in my heart that no antenna installed on a nice day could ever possibly work, but I had to try. The Tempo was sitting there, big knob staring at me like a baleful eye. The radio Tiki god must be placated!

So I found an old center insulator with integral balun I had stashed for a rainy day (or, as it happens, a sunny antenna-type day). It was an old Army-surplus device; we used to call it a "cobra-head", because that's what it looks like. It even had about twelve feet of RG-58 attached to it, complete with soldered PL-259.

Now, any idiot can tell you that twelve feet of feedline does not a good antenna make. But unless I used the 100' or so of RG-11 I managed to skive off the cable installer ("C'mon, man. It's the end of the roll. What use is it to you?" "Okay. Here." Cha-ching!), I was stuck with it. And I didn't want to marry myself to an antenna; I just wanted something with which to listen to my really old, really beat up radio.

I cut a 20m dipole, since I figured 80m would be too big a pain in the ass - I mean, too complicated an installation to temporary use. Here's where it gets interesting.

The elements were cut for 14.2 MHz (because I had that much wire left over from installing a couple of ceiling lamps in the foyer and dining room). I didn't have any end insulators, but that wasn't important, because I didn't have anything to hang the doublet from. A quick inspection of the front porch, though, showed me the way.

Apparently one of the previous owners of our house had a liking for those rattan (bamboo?) Venetian blinds, because there were small hooks screwed into the ceiling above the handrails every few feet. Not an ideal thing to hang antennas from, but the thing wasn't going to radiate, was it? The elements were hung along those hooks, and the ends tied off to the posts at the ends of the porch. Yes, tied off.

So I fire up the radio and hook up the antenna. Nice loud signals on 20m. I tuned around for a while, listened to a few QSOs, even copied some CW on the low end of the band. (For the record, my CW skills now suck. It's embarrassing.)

Then I heard it - a 6Y5 calling CQ. Yeah, I know it's only Jamaica, but I haven't worked any DX in five years. FIVE YEARS. So I grab the user's manual (What the hell does "Plate/Load" mean again?), flip a few switches, twiddle a few knobs, and toss "N3OYA, Oscar Yankee Alpha" into the fray. A blink later, I heard exactly what I expected.

"W5, the W5 give me your suffix again? W5 Romeo something, go."

Being the wire antenna little pistol I was, this was not only not discouraging, it had a semblance of normalcy. I was serene. That is, until I remembered I didn't have two VFOs anymore. Hope he doesn't decide to go split. Please, God, keep him on one frequency.

God and the Most Wanted List smiled on me. Jamaica is on the Top 100 list of "DX you're most likely to work," so there wasn't a great big market for the 6Y5 at 1300EDT. I kept calling, and finally got through. Not bad; first in the log at my new QTH, and it's DX!

While I was finishing patting myself on the back, my wife came in the room. "What's the smell?" she asked.

"Dunno," I replied. "I just worked a 6Y5!"

"Is it contagious?"

In the excitement, I had forgotten that I had pretty much dropped the hobby before we started dating, and she had absolutely no idea what I was preening about.

So I started walking through the house looking for something burning. Nothing in the kitchen, which by the by is at the back of the house. Strong aroma of cooked plastic at the front of the house. Strongest smell in the dining room, where the Tempo was (still is) set up.

A thorough inspection of the precious radio revealed neither visible damage nor the locus of the offending odor. Whew. But right behind it was the barely-cracked-open window, through which snaked the RG-58.

Curious, I sallied forth to the front porch, where I saw what remained of the cobra-head.

Whoops.

See, I forgot that the cobra-head was only rated for 50 watts. When I was trying to retrain myself how to tune the Tempo's transmitter, I was cranking 150-plus watts of cure CW tone into the balun. Poor little thing just couldn't stand the strain and gave up the ghost.

It still heard okay, though. A new antenna would have to wait for a little while, though; because I'm even more broke than normal.