Twitter Updates for 2008-09-30
September 30th, 2008- Stuck in traffic! #
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Stuff that I like, stuff I hate and all that is in between….
Stuck in traffic!
September 30th, 2008Stuck in traffic!
Rain 1 / Antenna 0.5 / Isaac 3
September 29th, 2008It was quite a weekend, so much that I’m in need of a rest to recover from it. :-)
So this was Isaac’s birthday weekend and we totally lucked out and had amazing weather. My mom and dad got up on Friday, so he got to spend a bunch of time with the grandparents. Isaac really likes my dad, Isaac was following him around all weekend.
My mom heard about my aborted attempt to get the antenna work done two weekends ago and told me I should just do it on Saturday afternoon. So I called up Scott and he was looking for an excuse to not work on paperwork, so he came over around noon on Saturday. Getting the old antenna and mast down actually went pretty quickly. We ended up having to-do a little antenna repair on my 6m beam, the boom was slipping in the host clamps. We got the new mast and 6m antenna up in the air, but it was already after 4pm at this point.
We made one attempt to raise the new HF beam (Cushcraft A3S), but it was pretty much a failure. We some how missed the fact we were raising the beam on the outside of the ginpole, so to attach it to the mast, we’d have to rotate it completely around. Which sounds easy, except I’m up at 45 feet and trying to man handle this beam which is 15 feet long and 25 feet wide.
I eventually called uncle, we lowered the whole thing back down to the roof and cleaned up. My forarms were killing me from hanging off the tower and my bad elbow was starting to twitch. (Which means it was about 30 minutes from locking up) I eventually got everything cleaned up, took a shower and then I took everybody out to dinner.
More on Isaac’s birthday party later….
Twitter Updates for 2008-09-20
September 20th, 2008- I think it is going to rain on my antenna party tomorrow – that isn’t good #
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Weekend Antenna Prep
September 20th, 2008(NOTE: I didn’t manage to get this posted last night, so the ordering is a backwards)
The big antenna party is tomorrow here at KU7M. I’ve rounded up a bunch of hams, I’m bribing them with amazing BBQ so they’ll come help me raise the new antenna. I’ve got the antenna more or less built and sitting in the backyard.
(It seems pretty big when looking at it this way.)
The plan is to replace the rotatable dipole (which is the big stick antenna) with this one. So basically the antenna above needs to go up here.
Now I just hope that I don’t get paged tonight, so I can have a full nights sleep. I’ve been just hammered this week with pages at night. I came home early today and crashed for a couple hours.
Rain 1 / Antenna 0
September 20th, 2008As the song said, “the rain came down”. It has pretty much been raining none stop all day. By 9:30AM this morning I decided to cancel the antenna party, climbing a tower in this kind of weather isn’t much fun and pretty stupid to boot. So I still have my new beam sitting on saw horses in the back yard and no clue when it might get on top of the tower. I’m sad…..
I think it is going to rain on…
September 19th, 2008I think it is going to rain on my antenna party tomorrow – that isn’t good
Twitter Updates for 2008-09-16
September 16th, 2008- Riding early bus – MicroHAMs meeting tonight #
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Riding early bus – MicroHAMs m…
September 16th, 2008Riding early bus – MicroHAMs meeting tonight