Monthly Archives: April 2013

Got sick

I had planned to be at SJ2W this whole week but managed to catch a cold and have been lying in bed for a few days. So plans are to spend a bit of next week at SJ2W instead getting some spring work done outside.

For the Swedish people here, I am in hunt for another tower. I need it to be 24-40m high and hopefully strong enough so I can make it rotatable. The backup plan is to build a tower but I would rather get hold of an already made one. Plan is to use it for inband operation in the future (maybe next year?) so I can put a triband stack in it and a 2el for 40m. I’ve been playing around doing some simulations of putting 3xJP-2000 tribanders which would be awesome (3el 20, 3el 15, 4el 15).

A thicker model (thicker than 280mm side) of the WIBE towers used by the military would be an OK backup plan. One could weld cross brases to stiffen the tower up making it possible to make it rotatable.

Various work at the station

This weekend me and the girlfriend went down to the station with a trailer we borrowed from a friend. I got some 7/8″ cable from SM2OAN earlier (5 pcs of rolls, about 50-70m long) that we took down and also some shelves and other stuff that was going to be thrown away at work. SM2RIX managed to get us a 220m roll of 1 1/4″ coaxial cable last year and I am missing about 220m more to have coax that we can use for the inband tower planned to be put up in the future, some 400-500m away from the other antennas. Hopefully I can manage to find a longer piece of coax for that so we don’t need to have so many possible failure points. However, in worst case that would be OK too. These coaxes will be used for the 40m tower project this summer and might also be enough for the 2nd 60m tower planned next year, for 80 and 15m.

I got the shelf put up in the basement which is good since I have a lot of stuff lying everywhere, so it’s pretty hard to keep things tidy, however every place to store things is a step in the right direction, but since I tend to just get more junk I guess I will never get rid of this problem 🙂

I also cut down an old bush that had been beaten by the snow a couple of winters, so now it can grow up and be pretty again. I also did some work preparing to fix the yard since we dug it up last year I will need to fill in with soil so we get grass there again and make it a bit more even. And it was very muddy, if we would have needed to stop on the road to the QTH I believe we would probably have gotten stuck, however its “only” about 1.5km so it’s not too bad. The yard is a mess too, very muddy so we had to park the car out by the road. The snow is melting very fast and there is barely any snow left in the woods, so the inband vertical should be useful for WPX CW so I will need to put the amp project on hold a while and fix the electronics for WPX CW so we can use it.

Amplifier progress

I did more work on the amplifier project. I did cut some aluminum sheets and also made some clamps for the inductor in the PI-filter, so that I don’t need to solder it all the time when tuning to the correct Q.

Now its ready for some paint!

More power supply work

Today I welded a bit more on the power supply amplifier box. I also grinded down all the welds and removed the paint so now its ready to get pretty with some black colour. I also drilled holes for the screws holding the side panels and got threads into those, it looks pretty good. I need to cut one of the panels since it was too long.