SGC Autocoupler Enclosure Modification

When this SGC-230 autocoupler was in use in Long Beach, it was in a clear plastic tote tub, mounted under the patio roof. Even though it was completely out of the sun, the plastic degraded so badly in the seven years it was outside that it crumbled and shattered when I pulled it down. For the 33' vertical experiment, I put it in a "Roughneck" plastic tub using a plastic breadboard for a back panel, and just plopped it on the ground.

For this iteration of my antenna "experiments", I need to mount the autocoupler to the fence, so I fell back on the way I did it in Long Beach, using two wood slats screwed to the enclosure, and then screw the wood slats to the fence slats using a length of 2x4 on the backside of the fence slats as a backer block.

Here's the stripped enclosure with the wood slats attached.

The slats are 1x3x36 oak from the Bargain Bin at Home Depot. Nice and straight and flat and CHEEP. I don't care that there's some chips and dents in them, but some people do.


 Inside shot of the box. The horizontal rows of holes at the top and bottom edges of the white plate are the screws that hold the slats on. The vertical rows of holes on the left and right are the attachment points for the SGC-230.

 This is the "Input" side of the autocoupler. The cable contains the RG-58A coax bringing in the RF from the radio, the DC power and ground, and a couple of signaling and control lines for remote control. The autocouplers will work quite fine with just the DC and RF applied, but SGC designed them with a few simple features that are nice to have. There's a "Tuned" signal that indicates when the tuner has the best match it can do, and a line that lets you "Lock" the tuner and inhibit it from automatically retuning when the load changes. This comes in handy if you use these in mobile operation where driving past objects can temporarily cause the autocoupler to 'hunt', and constantly try and rematch the antenna. The big stud on the right side is where the radials/counterpoise/ground system attaches, and where I'll reconnect the four radials I already have fabbed.

And this is the "Output" side or "Hot" side of the SGC. The ceramic terminal is the connection to the radiator. The piece of heavy cable you see is NOT coax; you never run coax on the output of these devices. It's a piece of "GTO" cable, meant for neon signs, and is rated at 25kV. Since this will be mounted out of harm's way, I can connect the antenna wire  to this terminal, taking care to provide an adequate amount of stress relief, i.e. slack.

 
SGC-230 all bolted back in the box, and just about ready to go!

The SGC autocouplers are another item I highly recommend.  I've never had one fail, and I've seen them mounted outside "AS IS", with no additional enclosure, on vehicles and boats, and while they looked pretty sad after 5+ years, they continued to function perfectly. There are other companies out there making very similar products, but I own two of these, and in the twenty-five years since I bought them used, they just keep ticking.

And best of all:

I also laid out and cut the 88' of wire I'll be using. It's #12 "FlexWeave" from Davis RF, and is very easy wire to work with. It uses "Rope Lay", and has 259 strands, making it extremely flexible and limp. This is from their website, and I can confirm you can tie a knot in the stuff, and then untie it months later. Pretty neat wire, and I had about 500' of it. Now I'm down to about 412'.....

So I'm humming along with this project, and have a few bits to gather up before the major stuff starts taking place. I'm going to try and get the end masts and autocoupler enclosure mounted on Thursday, depending on availability of my neighbor. The backer blocks are on his side of the fence, and he wants to help, so I hope he's around.

Random Wire Antenna Project Getting Started

I'm just getting going here putting up a permanent wire antenna. I really do need something better than the BuddiStick I've been using for several reasons. These antennas are really meant for temporary deployment, usually during portable operation. While they're built very well (the best I've seen!), they really don't stand up to 24/7/365 outdoor use here in Northern Colorado. Yes, I know a lot of people use them that way, and they've come up with ingenious ways to weather proof them, I just don't want mine to get all trashed when it doesn't have to. So, I'm tossin' up a big chunk of wire, and gonna load that up!

I can't say enough good things about the BuddiPole/BuddiStick antenna and the people that make them. These things are the Legos of the antenna world. You can almost configure them too many ways, but it's great fun to experiment with. They take a while to understand, and even longer to grok, but once you do you can build some very efficient antennas in a quite small space. Their customer service is exemplary, and the support for these things is phenomenal. Look into them if you need a small, light, portable antenna system and like to tinker with antennas.

While my BiddiStick 1/4-wave vertical is very effective on 20 Meters (14MHz band), it's physically too short for lower frequencies, and presents a non 50 Ohm impedance at higher frequencies. The "antenna tuner" add-on to my little Elecraft K2 is a wide-range "tuner", and can easily handle a mismatch of up to 10:1 VSWR. It's tuned anything I've ever connected to it, allowing the radio to put out full power into a 50 Ohm load. The "tuner" in the FT-1000D is designed to match up to a 3:1 mismatch, which basically means that it only works with an antenna that's already a fairly good match to 50 Ohms. Lots of people more properly refer to built-in "tuners" like this as "Line Flatteners", meaning the smooth out the bumps and ripples in an antenna system that's already in pretty good shape. In these cases, the "tuner" is at the radio, and a length of feedline (usually coaxial cable) runs to the antenna.

Why am I putting "tuner" in quotes? Because regardless of what people call these things ("Coupler" is the correct term), they cannot "tune" an antenna. The only way you can tune an antenna is by changing it physically; Length, height above ground, orienation, these are what you do to tune an antenna.. What all these devices do is to provide an impedance match between the feedline and the transmitter, enabling the transmitter to "see" a matched load and transfer maximum power. How well the antenna accepts that power and radiates it is anybody's guess. The important thing is that the transmitter is connected to a matched load and will happily hum along at maximum power. This also results in the feedline having anywhere from 1:1 VSWR to 20:1 (or higher) VSWR. Depending on the length and inherent loss of the cable used, very high (>10:1) VSWR can cause additional line loss. Coaxial lines with high VSWR also have a reputation for radiating (the cable becomes part of the antenna system), causing whatever pattern you thought you antenna had getting very distoted, and the resulting in RF in the shack, which is a whole 'nother article.

When the impedance matching device (aka "tuner") is located at the feed point of the antenna, different things happen.

#1, the load impedance presented to the transmitter is very nearly 50 Ohms, allowing the transmitter to deliver full power,

#2, the VSWR on the coaxial cable feedline is very close to 1:1, keeping voltage stress down,

#3, the chances of current flowing on the outside of the coax, making it radiate, are greatly diminished,

and #4, It'll tune damn near anything!

So, wire antenna supported as high as I can comfortably get it, fed by my trusty SGC-230 autocoupler.

And after much discussion with my buddy the Wire Antenna Guru, we've come up with some numbers that should work. I'll be running an 88' "Random Wire" antenna, with the ends about 15' off the ground, and the center at about 25'. This will be an "End Fed" antenna (otherwise it would be an off-length dipole!), and my SGC-230 autocoupler will be mounted on the fence at one end, with the wire connected to it. I'll run the ground radials along the fence about 4'~5' above the ground, giving me "Elevated Radials", which mitigates a lot of the ground loss. This is the loss that I saw when I had this coupler connected to the 33' vertical with only 4 radials laying on the ground. It would find a match, but it just didn't radiate very well compared to back in Long Beach where the radials were 8' above the ground.

The approximate center of the antenna will be about 25' high, using the 15' stump of the cottonwood we had cut down as part of the center support. I'm going to bore an 1-1/4" hole in the top of the trunk, and drive two sections of mast into the hole. The wire will come from the feed end, up to the mast, through a pulley, and then on to the far end, where the support rope will go through another pulley, and down to either a weight or a spring to keep some tension on it.

So I made up a list of stuff, and took a trip to Home Depot today. The Brown Truck of Happiness delivered my order from DX Engineering this afternoon, and I now have (I hope) all the bits and pieces to get this put together and in the air.

So stay tuned, pix will follow!

New (for Me!) Radio Installation

Not new as in brand-new, but a new one to me.

When I got back into Amateur Radio in 1995, there were four new radios considered "Top of the Line", and they were all way out of my price range.

The Big Boys were the Kenwood TS-950SDX ($4600), The Icom IC-775DSP ($4800), the Ten-Tec Omni VI+ ($2600), and the Yaesu FT-1000D ($4000).

The following photos are courtesy of RigPix.com

The Ten-Tec was punching way above it's "price weight" performance-wise, but Ten-Tec always did that. Those radios didn't appeal to me because the fit-and-finish on them wasn't what you expected in a serious radio, and they were always built a bit flimsy. It weighed 16 pounds.

The Icom has a reputation of being a very good radio, but several of my friends had problems at the time with a variety of brand-new, right-outta-the-box, high-end, Icom radios either being DOA, or failing spectacularly in the first few months, so I tended to shy away from certain Icom radios of that time period. It weighed 37 pounds.

The Kenwood was (and still is) a spectacular radio. I have one and love it. With addition of a narrow Inrad "Roofing Filter", it can hold it's own against newer radios costing thousands of dollars. Very smooth, sweet "Kenwood Audio", and you can listen to it for hours. Even though it was sold as part of the Kenwood 950-series radios, it was a completely different design architecture than the other three 950-radios. When QST magazine reviewed it, they said it was so different than the others that they were surprised that Kenwood didn't call it the TS-960S. It weighed 51 pounds.

The Yaesu was the heavy-weight champ. These radios weigh in at 52 pounds. They will NOT slide around on your desk when you plug in your headphones! Yaesu also extensively supported all the DXpeditions of the time, supplying these radios to teams of Hams who dragged them all over the world to extremely remote locations, and ran them 24/7 for days while their operation took place. From "Arctic Cold to Tropical Heat", these radios got the snot beat out of them, and took it. Definitely a SOLID radio!

So even though I'd really like a new Flex Radio 6xxx series, or a new Kenwood TS-890, or (drooool) a Yaesu FTdx-5000, I really don't think I can justify spending $4k or more on a new radio and connect it to the compromise antennas I'm stuck with (BTW...got a 'quickie' antenna project brewing) at this location.

I already have a TS-950SDX, so why not look for a good used FT-1000D to go with it? I have comparable rigs from Hallicrafters and Drake, dating to the mid 1960's, so why not get the other 'book-end' to the Kenwood and fill out my mid 1990's collection?

Took a couple of months, but I found this one, and it's a honey.

The "CQ WW WPX SSB" contest is this weekend, so even though solar activity is bottomed-out, a major contest like this brings out all the Big Gun stations, and the bands get crowded with strong signals.

First impressions are....WoW, what a receiver! I'd forgotten what a difference it made to have IF Width and Shift controls available to zero in on a signal with. My little Elecraft K2 is quite a competent radio, but this thing just blows it in the weeds. True, they're completely different categories of radio, designed to different cost and performance parameters, so I shouldn't be surprised, but it's been so long since I've driven a truly high-end radio that I forgot how good they are at digging out a single, weak, signal when there's a much stronger signal close to it in frequency. Or in the case of a contest, an S9+ signal on either side of an S3 signal.

And keep in mind that this is an entirely ANALOG radio. It has a digital readout, digital controls, and uses Direct Digital Synthesis to generate the Local Oscillators and VFO's, but the entire signal path, from the antenna to the speaker, is analog.

No DSP (Digital Signal Processing) either Radio Frequency ("RF"), Intermediate Frequency("IF"), or Audio Frequency("AF") is used. This is where my Kenwood "cheats" a bit, by having some very good DSP at a "Low IF" point in the radio. The Kenwood also uses the DSP to detect and recover the audio, and process the transmit audio. The Yaesu is nothing but filters, oscillators, amplifiers, mixers. At no point in the signal chain does the signal get digitized, fiddled with, and then reconstituted back into analog, resulting in a different sound.

Kinda like playing a vinyl album on a turntable connected to a good amplifier and speakers vs playing a CD on a new stereo. They can both sound "good", but they also "different".

It's a classic design, done right, with quality parts, and careful attention paid to details like proper filtering, gain distribution, mixer drive levels, and low-noise oscillators.

Anyway...it's nice having a "real" radio again, even if I'm stuck with my BuddiStick for now.......

Ford Raptor to Get the GT500's Supercharged V8

For those times when six cylinders just aren't enough.....

Full article describing the rip snortin', Seven Hundred horsepower engine can be found here at the Hagerty website.

And when you open the hood..........

Mini Road Trip This Morning.

Took a drive down to Erie, CO this morning to visit the Scuderia Rampante ("Raging Stables") restoration shop.

Yes, they mostly work on Ferraris.

This was a special event hosted by Hagerty, the company I have the Supra insured with.

I'm pretty sure I saw more Ferraris in one place this morning, than the total number I've seen in my life. F40's and F50's, a Lusso, and half-a-dozen or more 308's, including a rare fiberglass bodied one. The 308 (Magnum PI's car, if you don't know) was only produced with a FRP body for the first 10~12 months, and then Scaglietti, the coach builder who made the bodies for Ferrari, switched to steel bodies. The FRP bodied cars weigh about 350 pounds less, making them faster, and in greater demand.

The engine assembly room is just about "Clean Room" clean, and the work they do is absolutely first rate, from what I could see. They don't have an engine dyno, but they do have an engine test cell where they run the recently rebuilt engines through several hot/cold cycles, check it for leaks and funny noises, and then  do a break-in cycle to seat the rings.

And there were engines everywhere! 6 cylinder Dino engines, several V8's, and numerous, glorious, fabulous, V12's. Some were greasy lumps, some were just being taken apart, some were fresh out of the cleaning process but not assembled, and a few were on engine stands being carefully and methodically put back together.

I think I left several quart-sized puddles of drool around the shop!

Sorry, but I didn't take my camera, as there was no "camera policy" stated on the invitation, and I've been turned away from shops when I had a camera with me.

VERY enjoyable morning, and so far the car people are far friendlier and more enthusiastic than 95% of the alleged "Radio People" I've met since we moved here.

Thunder? Yes, Thunder!

Pretty appropriate to have thunderstorms the first week of Spring, but that's what's happening.

Maybe I should look up the Skywarn guys. Might be fun to do now that I live in a place with real weather.

And I just heard a solid report of a  tornado on the ground in Weld County (Eaton) near Weld Co roads 39 and 74.

New Operating Desk

After a year of using my "temporary" radio setup, I finally upgraded the folding, plastic table to a nice wood table with drawers.

The plastic table has served me well for over 15 years in Field Day duty, but it looked out of place in the sun room, and was about 10" shorter and 6" shallower, so organizing all my stuff on it was trying at times!

Lots of room now.....

And it has drawers, greatly helping to keep desk clutter down down to a manageable level.

That Sinking Feeling.....

Of plumbing repair.

We have a little 15" "Bar Sink" in one part if the kitchen. Like the main kitchen sink, it's a late 1970's cast-iron porcelain sink. Well.....it had a drippy faucet, and the original owners of the house never repaired it. The result was that the sink got severely corroded, and looked "Nasty" per my wife.

It doesn't show very well in the picture, but there's a huge green and rust stain from the water dripping over many years.

So I thought I'd surprise the wife with a new sink.

Which means pulling the old one out, which requires you to turn off the water. AND clean out the cabinet under the sink!

Hmm.....where are the valves, or as plumbers call them, the "Stops"?

A little searching, and cleaning out another cabinet, reveals they've hidden them in the bottom back of the leftmost cabinet!

So, with the water shut off, all the hose and drain connections were undone, and the old sink pulled out. This sink had NO mounting hardware holding it in. I was adjusting the cabinet doors once, and reached up for a handhold so I could stand up. I grabbed the sink, and imagine my surprise when it slid several inches!

So with the sink removed, and 30+ years of dirt cleaned up from where it sat, I measured out and marked where the countertop would have to be cut so the new sink would fit.

It took several additional light cuts to get the clearance I needed for the sink to fit, but I'd rather make repeated light cuts than go all berserker and wind up with a hole TOO big. BTDT!

And after some fettling, the new sink slipped right in. I installed new hoses, as even though I probably could have reused the existing lines, it's a LOT easier to change them now when everything is easy to get at.

I used the supplied special mounting hardware to securely fasten the sink to the countertop, and it's in there SOLID.

And of course, what homeowner plumbing job would be complete without an additional unplanned trip to Home Depot?

I see such a trip happening tomorrow morning............

Storm Has Passed

For the most part. It's still windy (30+MPH) and gusty (45MPH), and that's expected to continue through the night as the 'backside' of this low pressure system clips us as on it's way out as it moves to the Northeast.

Most of Western Nebraska is shut down, along with big sections of Eastern Colorado and Eastern Wyoming. The Dakotas are next to get clobbered, and all along the Eastern front of this massive low pressure (981mB) system tornadoes are popping up with big thunderstorms.

By now you've heard of the semi getting blown over and the train getting blown off the tracks. The guys on the Weather Channel are comparing this to a tropical storm, due to the very low barometric pressure, the level of the winds, and the amount of moisture it brought with it. I think it's a valid comparison, but had never considered it until I saw them chart similar storms that happen during the late Spring and through the Summer, and the similarities were striking.

1600 yesterday:

1600 today:

We didn't get nearly as much as was forecast, at least not in this part of town. I'd guesstimate maybe 3"~4" total. It started raining, then switched to sleet, then very fine sugar snow. By 1300~1400 it had changed to big flakes, and then tapered off and quit. The Cheyenne weather radar shows the system 'collapsing' and the 'eye' moving to the Northeast.

It left a little snowdrift at the back door:

Which Pebbles blasted right through when she finally decided to go outside at 1430, some 16 hours since her last pit stop.

So we pretty much skated through this one in this part of this city in this part of this county. Yes, I qualified that pretty tightly because while I have no doubts I could hop in the Jeep and get to pretty much anywhere in the city, I wouldn't leave the city for the next 36 hours or so unless absolutely necessary.

Pretty much everything East of here is shut down, and I saw some reports that the ranchers may need the Air National Guard to help them get feed out to their cattle. And it's calving time, and they're worried they're going to lose a lot of calves this Spring.

This is a very powerful storm covering about 8 states, and you just don't screw around with this weather unless you have to.

And as of 1815 I see they've declared "A State of Emergency" in Denver. Looks like all the freeways around and through the city are jammed with vehicles going absolutely nowhere. I heard some radio chatter on the scanner discussing it, and talking about what exits to use, and where people could stay.

It's a Real Good Day to Stay Inside

Youch.....well, it's here.

DIA is pretty much closed, with 1300 flights canceled, runways they can't keep clear, and EIGHTY MPH wind gusts with sustained 65MPH winds.

All the hotels surrounding the airport are at capacity due to the canceled flights.

The Weather Channel keeps making a big deal out of reports of wind gusts hitting NINETY-SIX MPH down in Colorado Springs.

Interstate 80 is closed.

Parts of Interstate 25 are closed.

"All Roads" in the Nebraska panhandle are closed.

And I just heard on the scanner there was 25 car pile-up in the vicinity of I-25 and Rte 34, down by "The Ranch", which is what we locals call the Larimer County Fairgrounds.

1600 yesterday, Tuesday:

1215 today:

The overnight rain-to-snow transition put a load of ice on the screen for the dining room window:

So while we haven't had all that much snow, it's blowing like crazy, and there are times it's hard to see the house across the street. One of our neighbors has lost some branches from one of their big pine trees, and our next door neighbor to the South looks like she might lose a section of her back fence.

And I just noticed that the snowflakes are getting much larger. All the snow last night, and up to 1400 local time, was very fine sugar snow. Now we're starting to get much larger flakes.

The next 14~16 hours should be interesting.

Stay warm, my friends! This stuff will flat-out KILL you, so please be safe, too.

Storm Arrival Update

No, I'm not gonna get all ZOMG!! SNOWMAGEDDON!!! on you. I had enough of "StormWatch2017" in Lost Angeleez.

It's 0030 here, and it's been drizzling for a couple of hours.

NWS reports:

Wednesday

Rain and snow, becoming all snow after 7am. The snow could be heavy at times. Widespread blowing snow, mainly before 4pm. Temperature falling to around 30 by 5pm. Very windy, with a north northwest wind 9 to 19 mph increasing to 27 to 37 mph. Winds could gust as high as 60 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New snow accumulation of 3 to 7 inches possible. 

 

Wednesday Night

Snow, mainly before 11pm. Areas of blowing snow. Low around 22. Very windy, with a north northwest wind 32 to 37 mph decreasing to 25 to 30 mph after midnight. Winds could gust as high as 44 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%. New snow accumulation of around an inch possible. 

 

So it looks like we have a serious (to me, anyway) storm coming in. From the forecast, this will be the first real winter storm that we've had since we moved here. And my wife is back in SoCal, where it's expected to be sunny and in the mid 70's.

 

Updates to follow!