Posts Tagged → antenna
Delayed Dismantle
In our preparation to sell our home we have been trying to restore the house to a sellable condition including taking down my ham radio tower. Today was supposed to be the day that it was taken down and sold. Unfortunately the buyer could not come out today so it will have to wait until next weekend. I have mixed feelings about selling the tower because as a ham radio operator I have always dreamed of having my own tower. Unfortunately this is not compatible with a new home in the city. Not to mention it is not attractive to many people. The tower was installed August 3, 2003 and will likely come down next weekend. To a ham radio operator, having a large tower is very attractive but not to the average person. When we move, we will still have antennas in a low profile configuration. I will likely still have a dipole antenna for high frequency (HF) operation. I will also have a small vertical for VHF and UHF. A large antenna of this sort requires a large area and some understanding neighbors. I have no intention to give up my radio hobby but will just learn to do it in a more discreet way. The antenna on the top belongs to our UHF repeater that will be taken down and re-installed on my dad’s tower with a side mount. Currently the repeater is down because I had to pull the feed line loose so the tower can be disassembled.
I will still have remote control access to both of our repeaters. It has been a lot of work trying to get the house back in shape to sell. It did not help with the recent cold weather causing water lines to freeze. I think the house will appraise at a higher value without the tower behind. This is the reason we want to take it down sooner than later. For those of you that depend on our 443.3 MHz UHF WIN System repeater, do not be concerned, because it will be back up soon. It will be moved to the same location as the 145.25 MHz repeater. If you have more questions not addressed here, let me know.
Towers Fixed
You may remember last week I posted about a storm that came through and caused some damage around my dad’s house along with mine. This storm caused a lot of hail damage to my car, bent the repeater antenna on my tower and also on my dad’s tower. I just did not have the time, nor the desire to climb the tower and try to fix the damage. As I get older, I do not feel comfortable climbing the tower to work on antennas when I do not have a safety harness. Well my dad is very resourceful and managed to find a tower climber and fixed both antennas yesterday. It is nice having a dad that use to be in the radio industry for many years. That is one crisis that is not a problem anymore. Thankfully the repeaters were not affected in the first place. both the two meter and the 70 cm repeaters still work fine and it was just the repeaters themselves that were affected. Disaster is averted! 
Broken Antenna
This week has been very busy with having to work overtime the last two weekends in a row and working two hours overtime each day. Some point this week, my HF antenna fell from the tower and landed on my next door neighbor’s power line. Both the antenna and her power line were insulated so it was not a big deal for it to lay there a couple days because I just have not had time to work on it. As you can see below, it is the antenna on the top and to the left. It is an Alpha Delta DX-LB Plus 6 through 80 meter dipole antenna that was quite expensive.
What happened was that I had the antenna suspended on a pole off the side of the tower at 50 feet by a pulley and a nylon rope. Some time this week, the rope broke sending the antenna to the power line below. Well I hoped the neighbor would not notice it until I would have time to fix it but she did. The night before last she came to the door about 8:00 pm and told us how concerned she was. Of course I had already showered for bed because I had to be up at 4:00 am. Well the next morning I got up and I was on that tower about 40 feet up at 5:00 am trying to pull the antenna off the wire. Because the antenna has large traps on it, the antenna did not want to cooperate. I eventually got it down but not after getting every dog in the neighborhood wound up. Man I have the most stupid dogs that live next door to me on three sides. These dogs will bark non stop for hours on end. If I did not sleep with a fan next to my head, I would never get any sleep.
For the life of me I cannot see what the attraction is to a loud barking dog. They have all the appeal of a wasp in attack mode. Oh well, I did manage to get the antenna down without destroying it though it is all tangled up. I hope to be able to work on it within the next few weeks and get it back up. I really am not up to climbing the tower any time soon because my feet have been hurting a lot lately. So this means that I will not be on the radio in the near future. Do you hear that lady next door? When your television is not working right, it is not me. Just kidding. She is okay but she does think it is me sometimes when it is not. That is part of the way of life when you are a ham rado operator. People will see your antenna and just assume that it is you that is messing up their television. I have been watching TV and not even have the radio turned on and people come to the front door and accuse me of coming in on their television. It just comes with the territory as my dad can attest to. He has had similar experiences at his house with false accusations
For the most part, things have been going fine around here except for all the overtime. Some people love working overtime but not me. I believe that time is the only resource that you cannot get more of. You can work and get more money but you cannot get more time. Fortunately my overtime is limited in scope and I work with some great people. I am looking forward to not working next weekend. Well I think that just about covers my week. I thought I should post an update since I have not posted much lately. I will try to keep this up to date more so you will know how things are going.
Field Day
Today is a special day for amateur radio operators. You may have heard them referred to as ham radio operators. I have been a licensed ham radio operator since I was 17 years old in 1983. Today being the last Saturday of the month of June makes this a day that many hams look forward to and it is called Field Day. Throughout the years, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has justified allotting certain radio bands aside to the Amateur Radio Service for emergency communications. The Amateur Radio Service is a group of frequencies that cover the entire radio frequency spectrum set aside so that ordinary citizens would be fully trained to perform radio communications in the event of an emergency.
Each year on the last Saturday in June, hams from all over the world set up tents with generators, solar cells, batteries, and all sorts of remote radio gear with their log books in hand. They do a contest to see how many contacts they can get all over the world on different bands using primitive radio power and antennas. This is what they call Field Day. Literally thousands of ham radio operators do this world wide exchanging call signs, signal reports and locations (QTH) logging them in. Contesting has never appealed to me so I usually sit this out but many enjoy this immensely. Every band is filled with thousands of calls CQ contest CQ contest, or CQ Field Day. This event usually makes the news at least here in Oklahoma City. Here it is 10:51 PM and the bands are still filled with people as I type this.
The above image is my ham radio station that was taken a while back. It is not in that configuration anymore but still looks similar to this. Below is the antenna that I use to transmit from. I have superimposed the text on there with Photoshop so you can see what each antenna is for. If you are interested in ham radio let me know and I will get you information that you can use.
One thing that I love about ham radio is that there are so many different methods of communicating using computers, AM, FM, single sideband. Since I love computers so much I often like to use my computer as a tool on ham radio. I really love high frequency (HF) communications using the shortwave bands. This is where your signal hits the invisible ionosphere and the signal bends back to the earth where people can hear your signal for hundreds and even thousands of miles. Another interesting phenomenon is the stratospheric ducting. This is when the atmosphere has an inversion, or a layer of warm air above the surface of the ground. Both UHF, and VHF communications can speak hundreds of miles when this happens. It usually happens at after sunset or before sunrise in my part of the country. I always use the old back up, Skype to coordinate an available frequency so that I am not transmitting on top of someone. I am hearing a guy in Seattle, Washington right now and he is coming in very strong. If you ever try ham radio, you will likely be hooked.
Technorati Tags: ham radio,field day,antenna,radio,amateur radio,K5GLH,Skype
January 12, 2008 Update
Good morning everyone,
I am anxiously awaiting the sun to return and the temperature to rise a bit. Every since the ice storm in December, life has been out of order. We have been slowly getting back to normal. Yesterday was a big step in getting back to normal when the city of Del City’s contractors came to pick up the broken tree limbs and debris from my street. There was so many branches in front of my house that I could only see the top half of the house across the street and it was driveway to driveway. After picking up the branches with a mechanical arm on a tractor and dropping them into a large truck, my yard is pretty messed up. That arm put some deep cuts in the front yard and left many branches laying in the street. After raking them back up, there was another pile about 3 feet tall and 7 feet long. I cannot complain though because it would have taken me 10 loads to get all the debris to the land fill.
My beautiful wife and oldest son and his girlfriend are in Altus, Oklahoma today visiting my sister in-law. I really hope they have a good time. My youngest son is staying with a friend in Shawnee so I am here alone. I had planned on climbing the ham radio tower to fix my high frequency (HF) antenna that was destroyed during the ice storm. A neighbor’s tree had fallen across the fence and snapped the wire and bent the 10 foot stand off pole at the top that keeps the antenna away from the tower legs. As you can see from the photo below, the tree is laying across the power lines and all around my tower. It was terrible but on January 8, 2008, that tree was cut to the ground and it cost me a fortune but it was worth every dime.
I was going to do this repair on the antenna last weekend but I climbed about 35 feet and changed my mind because of the heavy winds. It was windy all week except yesterday that was perfect but I did not have time to work on it. Today, it is cold with a North wind. I looked at the Satellite photo and found that clearing sky is coming this way within an hour and it should warm up to 54 today. Hopefully I can get that antenna fixed today. I should have to climb the tower twice, once to take the antenna down, and another time to re-install.
We finally got the next door neighbor’s very large elm tree cut down and that should make working on the tower much easier. That tree was a thorn in our side for 9 years. During the ice storm, a very large tree limb fell on the tower guy wire and pulled up one of the anchors on the opposite side. We had to hire some people to come over and cut up the branches and then finally the entire tree. That tree pulled the power box off the back of the house in the last two ice storms. Then I had to get some new bigger and stronger anchors for the tower. I had to re-level the tower and tighten all the guy wires to make it safe again before I even considered fixing the antenna. It has been more than a month since that ice storm and we are still feeling the effects. I sure hope I can get my front yard back to normal. The really tore up the grass picking up the branches.
Well school starts back for me at the University of Oklahoma (OU) tomorrow so I will have to get back to work. The break I had was not very relaxing as I had hoped since I had to have surgery, then lose power for a week, then spend days cutting up and raking tree limbs. One of the problems with living in an older neighborhood is there are large, well established trees and all the power lines are above ground. Ice storms have the potential of doing a lot of destruction in those situations. Well I think I covered most of what I wanted to cover so I will say goodbye for now.
Technorati Tags: ice storm,University of Oklahoma,OU,antenna,repair,tree,damage
HF Antenna
I am trying to decide on a multiband dipole antenna for my HF radio. I have very limited room on my property. My yard is only 65 feet at the widest point and my neighbor has a large tree that hangs over into my yard. I have a G5RV up there that works fine but the wind keeps breaking it. Maybe the W5GI Mystery antenna, or the B&W folded dipole? I have been off HF for quite a while because my antenna is broken.
Technorati tags: amateur radio, w5gi, antenna, ham radio