Saturday, July 21, 2012

Quiet, Relaxing, Goof-Off Day

We're in the midst of our next launch campaign, so I've been pretty busy at work the last week or so.

We busted our tails Thursday and Friday, with the result that we (my little RF group) didn't have to work this weekend.

SO....I slept in till 9 this morning (oh you sluggard!), and I've been just goofing off today. My son is coming over tomorrow so we can work on his car stereo/navigation unit, and I'm taking the Mrs out to dinner tonight to one of our favorite places, George's Greek Cafe.

If you *EVER* get in the Long Beach area, stop in for some of the best Greek food on the planet.  Friendly staff, excellent service, very reasonable prices, and as I said, most excellent Greek cuisine.

And I've been making some drawings and little fiddly bits for the all new-and-improved portable satellite station I'm going to use next year at Field Day.

I've got a super duty, 5' tall all metal surveyor's tripod that I bought for about $30. I'm going to make an aluminum mounting plate to bolt my Yaesu G-5400 Azimuth/Elevation rotator to it, separate the two rotator sections with about 3' of 2" heavy wall aluminum pipe, use one of my "spare" fiberglass cross-booms, a "spare" dual-band antenna, some preamplifiers I just bought from a friend, and I'll have an antenna setup that gives my 90% of the performance of my "big" setup, that's about 1/4th the weight, and 10 times easier to set up and tear down.


3 comments:

  1. Down time is good! And the antenna build sounds like FUN!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Old NFO beat me to it, so what he said.

    ReplyDelete
  3. My son bailed out on working on his car today, so I'm cutting metal, drilling holes, and pawing through my hardware assortment today.
    Found a couple of "design errors" as far as mounting everything together, so I'm noodling those out.

    ReplyDelete

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