Breakfast at Dennys with Isaac…
June 20th, 2009Breakfast at Dennys with Isaac – we are going to try french toastix today! http://myloc.me/4EzB
Breakfast at Dennys with Isaac – we are going to try french toastix today! http://myloc.me/4EzB
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Raining in Seattle, after a month of sun, it actually seems weird. Yea, rain in Seattle seems weird.
It was a pretty productive weekend around the Richards house. The whole family made a trip into Bellevue on Saturday for some Transformer supplies. By the time we were done, Isaac was already heading into nap mode, so I did a quick in and out at Radio Shack. My goal for the week was to get most if not all the radio prep done for Field Day. My current plan is to try and do 90% PSK31/RTTY for a number of reasons. 1) I’ve made maybe two contacts using PSK31 and none on RTTY, so it will be a learning experience. 2) My K3 is a sweet digital radio and now it has a full 100 watts available. 3) Digital points count the same as CW, so major points bonus.
So the Radio Shack dash and grab was for a second audio cable, my junk box only had one of the required cables and I was hoping to actually make a contact. I didn’t quite make the contact, but I did at least get two different programs decoding correctly. I listen to a Cuban station make several PSK31 contacts on Sunday night. (On 40m) So hopefully this week I’ll finish the setup and make sure the TX side is working.
I also wanted to get a little antenna work done. I’ve been without a low band antenna since the tree fell over in our front yard two years ago. (maybe three?) I had a 20 feet piece of wire strung to the roof tied to my SGC237, which loaded up 80m/40m, but never really worked. The wire came down during the house painting process, so it was time to-do something. Some time ago I bought a G5RV, I think it was during a Field Day to debug another problem, so its been quite a while ago. (I bought it at Radio Depot, so its been years) So I decided the quite antenna solution was to pull up this G5RV and plug it into the SGC237.
Last winter I had actually prepped the last remaining tree in our front yard for this antenna work. While all the leaves were gone, I climbed into it and hung a pulley with black rope in the top. This was easy enough to pull out now, even with all the leaves. I still had the support I put up long ago in the back and the tower pulley was already prepped with new rope. So I climbed up on the roof and with Rosie’s help got the G5RV hung. The ladder line even hung a good three feet from the tower naturally, which was pretty cool. The only problem was hooking up the SCG237, I realized there was no way the existing power line was going to reach and I didn’t want to rig up something different. So I had the brought idea to just put the SGC237 into the shack, at the other end of the RG8 run.
So this idea kind of sucked. I realize later that the SCG237 is really designed to be at the termination point of the antenna, it doesn’t like being on the end of 30 feet of coax. So it sort of worked, but not really. Upon further thought I came up with a solution. The SGC237 only needs about 300mA, so I ordered a 12v supply for some toy off Amazon which is rated at an 1 amp. I’ll put it into the garage and run a power line out to the underside of the house eves. The eves on our house over hang a good two feet, so I’ll put the SGC under there, where it is out of the weather and within 10 feet of the garage power run. This will allow me to hook the SCG directly to the end of the ladder line of the G5RV and hopefully make it happier.
I was going to write some more about this weekend, like Isaac riding around in his wagon with his Transformer costume on, but that will have to wait for another day. I did want to post some pictures of the almost finished garden, which is going crazy right now. I have tomatoes showing up, green peppers and all sorts of other stuff. I might even finish hauling in the rest of the rock and finish the stone wall this summer.
I’ll write about my crappy Monday some other time. Let just say that all the goodness of the weekend was gone by about 10am.
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At least the sun is back..
It appears the world blew up over the weekend at work and I got paged at 3am this morning.
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http://twitpic.com/7fnup – Something is wrong with this…
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