Chapter 7

25 April 2006

I have no idea why this stupid blogger won't let me put things in order by date. That's what I get for not inputting the info on the date desired, I guess.

Well, now I've kind of got everything set up, and you can read the continuing saga of Rebuilding N3OYA here instead of waiting for me to upload HTML.

So, on with the ramblings.

As you've probably read on the main site, the station is being rebuilt. I used to run a Yaesu FT-840, an MFJ-949 manual antenna tuner, and a ladderline-fed doublet. Pretty standard fare for the new young radio amateur, really.

A few years ago, shortly after Kass and I married, I sold off everything but my old 2-meter handheld FM transceiver. After all, we lived in an apartment. I lacked space to erect antennas, I couldn't get a decent ground (we were on the upper floors, and there was PVC between the station and ground in all the water pipes).

Chapter 6

16 April 2006 - Happy Easter!

N3OYA is now on 20m fer sure! I made myself a vertical.

You know those green (or blue) plastic tarps you can get for picnics or your backyard? They've got aluminum poles for support. Each section is about four feet long. I started sticking sections together until I got longer than 16.5 feet, screwed them together with self-tapping sheet-metal screws, and cut off the rest.

The feedpoint is about six inches above the ground, and is comprised of a wooden dowel stuck a good two feet up into the mast and a good six inches into the base section. Sheet-metal screws hold it all together.

It loads effortlessly all over the 20m band. I tried like hell to make a contact with it, but 20m has been deader than a very dead thing all day. I heard - dimly - EA8/DL6FAW around dusk, but he went QRT thirty seconds after I found him. I heard a few other stations, including another 6Y5, but all everyone was talking about was how crappy the band was. Even the Maritime Mobile Net on 14.300 was dead; maybe one or two stations.

But tomorrow is another day! Well, Tuesday is another day; I'm working twelve hours tomorrow.

Chapter 5

12 April 2006

The weather held. My new parallel dipole is up! I have a voice on 75m. I'm not very loud, but I'm getting into Maine, so something's going right.

The dipole is only about 30' up. That means my 75m signal is NVIS (Near-Vertical Incidence Skywave), but I'm getting out to the Mid-Atlantic and New England. Good enough for now.

For some reason, 20m isn't working worth a damn. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why. I've pulled the antenna down and trimmed it - mathematically, it was about four inches too long, I discovered - with no effect. Oh, well. That's leaves another antenna project in my future. In the meantime, I can use 75.

Chapter 4

9 April 2006

Melody, Sebastian and I are coping. Not thriving, but coping. I cannot believe how much I miss my sweetie. I know it knocks my Manliness Factor down about ten pips, but there it is.

As a method of keeping busy, I decided to make a new antenna for my Tempo to feed.

A cruise through the Junque Box revealed a bunch of 300-ohm TV twinlead from some forgotten project and a surfeit of 18-ga stranded bare wire. A cruise through my old ham radio magazines - and my 1994-vintage RSBG handbook - told me to build a parallel dipole for 75 and 20.

I cut two lengths of the twinlead to make a half-wave on 14.2MHz. One end was shorted; this end attaches to the center insulator. One wire on each twinlead section was then attached to enough 18-ga copper wire to make up the legs of the 75m doublet (cut for 3.9MHz).

A trip to the shopping center gleaned the rest. From Home Depot came some stainless steel bolts, nuts, and washers, as well as four 3/4" PVC couplers for end insulators. Total: $5.57, including tax.

From K-Mart came a polyethylene cutting board. Martha Stewart's gonna be ticked, but that cutting board - which cost me $4.23, by the way - not only made the center insulator, it also will make a couple more.

The most expensive bit was the coax. I was forced to go to Radio Shack for it, because it was Sunday and all the radio shops were closed. The truck stops around here carry coax for far lower cost than RS, but it only comes in 18' lengths, maximum. I bought 100 feet, and it was just enough.

The rest was just cable ties and solder. It went together without a hitch, but I didn't get a chance to string it up. Dammit!

Chapter 3

Today I put Kass on a plane to Australia. She'll be gone for about a month. I don't know how I'm going to get through it all, but I'll muddle through, I guess. It's going to be tough. I dropped her off at JFK this afternoon, and thank God I had the 2m rig in the truck, or I would never have made it home through Long Island; sheer boredom would have done me in.

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.

Chapter 1

Today I went back to Mom & Dad's place in central Pennsylvania. Just a day trip to get some of the massive amount of junk I've stored in their basement since I finally flew the nest some years ago. I didn't get all of it - I've only got one full-size pickup truck, you know - but I got a good bit of it, including all of my old ham radio magazines from when I was really active in the mid-to-late 90s.

And for once, I had a flash of foresight. Since I knew I was coming into the area, I sent an email to my oldest and dearest pal. I had loaned Roy, KB3CZD, my very old Henry Tempo One (also known as Yaesu's FT-200 or Sommerkamp FT-250). Works 80, 40, 20, 15, and 10.

Well, at least it's supposed to work those bands. Roy informed me that 40m was still on the fritz; I was hoping he'd get someone to sort that out so he could sell it. Maybe that's why I only paid $50 for it at a hamfest about ten years ago.

Anyway, I collected the Tempo One and power supply/speaker from Roy and his lovely wife, and booked on home. Once I got there, it was reverently placed on a table in the living room, still in its tattered cardboard box...