Watching very young kid at air…
May 19th, 2011Watching very young kid at airport study a book on C, I thought that was only for old grisly guys that didn’t believe in this object stuff?
Watching very young kid at airport study a book on C, I thought that was only for old grisly guys that didn’t believe in this object stuff?
Made it thru security with little fuss, waiting at gate with good view of food lines. I’m off for my #hamr weekend!
So totally behind on things, still have to pack tonight for #hamr trip to Dayton OH.
Taking the day off-building a standing desk, going to FSF for going away lunch and then a movie with Isaac!
@bernard_ben No sudoku, but we left a glass bowl…..
@theG00NI3 I’ve found you either like JJ or hate them. I much prefer JimmyJohns over Quizno’s or Subway…
Just reset PIN on special account that gets all the monies when I sell my junk on Amazon. It was painless Chase, thanks. Now lunch!
Huge line at JimmyJohns…
Moving day – start new job (still at Amazon) on Monday… http://t.co/1Xj5Gxe
As I wrote about in past posts (here and here), I had some rotor problems back in 2009 and they didn’t finally get ‘fixed’ until the summer of 2010. At least I thought I had fixed them, as it turned out I replaced what was probably a perfectly good antenna rotor. About three months ago I noticed that the new Yaesu rotor (G-1000) was starting to-do the same thing as the old one (Ham IV). I couldn’t believe this, what could cause the brand new one to start ‘dying’ like the old one?
My original thought was that maybe when I installed the new antenna mast, I screwed up the thrust bearing or something. The reason both rotor’s stopped working was a ‘stuck’ thrust bearing or something like that.(Yes, I was grasping at straws) So I climbed the tower on the first nice day of the year and gave everything a once over. What I discovered didn’t make sense to me. Having Rosie operating the rotor, I wasn’t able to ‘hear’ anything in the rotor, it seemed to be totally dead. I then loosen the thrust bearing and made sure it wasn’t ‘stuck’. Finally I climbed all the way to the top of the tower and checked the mast with a level. As best as I could tell, everything was installed right and should have been working. Since I had run out of ideas for things on the tower, I yanked the rotor cable and climbed back down.
Why did I pull the rotor cable? Because there didn’t seem to be anything else that could be wrong. Over the coarse of the next couple months I managed to pull all the cables apart and checked that all the connections worked. Since all the connections in the control cable seemed to be good, I started looking harder at the rotor control. Initially I assumed it was fine, since it was brand new. I did some internet searching and had a pretty good idea how a ‘good’ one worked, so I ran through the standard diagnostics. The only problem I found is that the rotor control was working perfectly.
Great, I had eliminated all the individual components, except the actual rotor and eliminating it would require removing it from the tower. I didn’t want to go down that road, since I had just done that last summer, so I decided to try replacing what seemed to be perfectly good parts that didn’t require mass amounts of tower work. I bought some replacement rotor control cable and the special Yaesu rotor connector, I was going to make a completely new rotor cable first. In the process of starting to pull apart the existing connectors, I finally got the flash of DOH! I needed. And yes, it was one of those incredible stupid / simple things I’d been staring out and completely missed.
So to explain this, I have to go back to when I installed the original HAM IV rotor on the tower. In planning out how everything was going to get assembled, I realized that attaching the rotor control cable to the bottom of the rotor was going to be a pain in the butt. Since I couldn’t install the rotor when the top tower section was on the ground, I went looking for a water proof ‘connector’ solution. I don’t know where I found it, but I found this great 8-pin water proof connector which screws together. Using this I made myself a short pig-tail (about 1.5 feet actually), one end had the water proof connector and the other I wired straight to the rotor. This allowed me to install the rotor in the tower and not have to hang upside down trying to connect the 6 rotor control cables.
Great, now fast forward to yesterday when I started dis-assembling the control cable. As I was making sure the wire diagram I made years ago was correct, I realized that some of the pins in the water proof connector wasn’t sticking out as far as others. As a matter of fact, most of them were at best half as long as they should have been. I then yanked the whole thing apart and realized what happen.
At some point when attaching the connector, some of the pins had worked their way out. This was probably due to my not installing it right in the beginning. So as I moved the cable from one rotor to the other, I probably moved things just enough to allow the pins to make a connection. But with time on the tower, they would get hot and cold enough to slip out and presto, no more connection.
I should have taken some pictures of this, but when I figured it out I was so happy, that I just fixed it. All it took was pulling the entire connector apart and making sure all the little pieces were ‘shaped’ right to be fitted back into the connector housing. This time I went a little further and pulled all of them from the other side using needle nose pliers to make sure they were seated good. I then connected and un-connected the water proof plug about two dozen times, just to make sure nothing was coming loose this time.
I had figured that it would be a while until the weather allowed me to go back up the tower and test my ‘new’ cable solution. But as luck would have it, it stopped raining Sunday afternoon and by 6pm it was dry enough to go up the tower. It was a quick trip, since I just had to plug in the rotor control cable and tape everything back in place. When we turned the rotor control on and engaged it, the antennas swung around perfectly. I was so happy it worked, since the only thing left was to replace the whole rotor again. I’m guessing that the old one probably works as well and I’ll be testing that theory soon…..