After long being tired of the poor performance of my HF9v with 18 radials, I finally sold it off to a fellow ARROW club member for what I had invested (not a lot) and was left with the radial field in the woods (now mostly buried after 3 years). I let it sit for a while, wandering out there every few weeks to prune a few branches and stare at the mast and wires sticking out of the berm between my yard and the freeway. I went by it when I was re-working the big horizontal loop, which broke around Labor Day, and kept thinking of what to do … pull up the radials? That seemed like a shame. Or put them to use them somehow else?
Eleven newly minted hams
Congratulations to all the new hams from the Hands on Museum class of 7 November 2009
KD8MJU Adam R. Carpus
KD8MJV Ari D. Morris
KD8MJW Brian M. Retzlaff
KD8MJX Steve R. Peterman
KD8MJY Elizabeth C. Gilday
KD8MJZ Dawn Chambers
KD8MKA Nandan Sawkar
KD8MKB Karin K. Riske, no email address
KD8MKC Daniela Gomez, no email address
KD8MKD Sally A. Carpinella
KD8MKE John I. Hritz, Jr.
Hope to see you all at the next Arrow club meeting on Dec 9th at the Red Cross chapter 4624 Packard Rd.
Meet Hamlet, the Newest Member of the WA2HOM Team
Meet Hamlet, the newest member of the WA2HOM team. Mostly he just sits around and chews the fat, but I’m trying to teach him CW.
ARROW Participates in First A2 Mini Maker Faire
James, W8ISS, headed up our effort at Saturday’s MiniMaker Faire. More later on how it went after I talk with him, but here are some pictures from the event taken by Mike Gould of Monodyne: Continue reading
The Big Horizontal Loop Goes UP! And down! And up again!
Spring contest season demanded a new antenna that would handle 160m with some efficiency and compliment my other antennas. I settled on the >1 wavelength horizontal loop for its multi-band potential, relative invisibility, and ease of matching. Anything over a wavelength on 160m (540′ length) would be sufficient, but longer is better, as it lowers radiation angles and improves performance.
Radiation Angle Counts for a Lot – an Argument for Having Both Vertical and Horizontal Antennas on HF
Since I reconnected the coax to it, my vertical dipole – a tribander driven element hung from a high tree branch – has still not seemed to work well. I would switch back and forth between it and my 20/40/80 horizontal fan dipole, and the horizontal was always at least an S-unit better. In the WPX SSB contest the vertical dipole was only better when the signal came from directly off the end of the horizontal dipole, and I began to think I had water in the coax.