Sunday Morning "Excitment".....

Not sure what else to call it when you see a brigade of firetrucks screaming into your neighborhood...

My wife wondered what all the fire trucks were doing, so since she twisted her knee, I turned on my scanner and walked down the street.

There were five fire trucks, three Suburbans, two ambulances,, and firemen everywhere. The house had ladders up to the second story on three sides of the house, and firemen were scrambling up and down them with hoses, axes, and other fire fighting tools.

The scanner locked on to the Poudre Fire Authority channel, and I found out one of their solar panels failed, caught fire, and set the roof on fire. Our neighbor's kids right across the street were outside playing in their backyard, saw the smoke, told their Mom, who called the homeowners, who looked outside and immediately dialed 911.

Seeing that Fire Station #4 is less than a mile away, I'm sure they were here PRONTO.

From what I heard on the scanner, the fire was contained to just the roof, and burned a hole about 6"x12" through the roof. The firemen reported very minor smoke and water damage to the attic and ceiling, and they used big fans to clear the house.

So no major damage, NO injuries, and kudos to the kids who spotted it, and told their Mom, who called the neighbors.

And three cheers to the Poudre Fire Authority for their rapid response, and excellent job in striking the fire.

Car Audio/Nav Update

Well, after soldering up the new harness, I got ready to install the radio this morning, but had a few checks to make before I went ahead and screwed it into the dashboard.

But let me back up and fill you in on what happened.

A month or so ago I went to a Hagerty Driver's Club event at the Scuderia Rampante in Erie, Colorado. The morning was cold, and the car radio was being really wonky about playing anything from the USB stick, and when I pulled the stick out of the socket, the radio reset, and then shut down ( ! ), causing me to have to pull off the road and try to get it going again. It finally turned on, but just sat there mute, so I sighed and continued on my trip. Sometime later it finished booting up, and started to work normally. Then the day we went to DIA to pick up my wife's friend, I started the car, and NO radio. Nothing.

Checked all the fuses, pulled the unit from the dash and reseated all the connectors and nada. So I coughed up the $$ for a demo unit that was a floor display at a stereo place. And of course, none of the connectors are the same, so down to the basement to make things match up. I also corrected some (*GASP!*) wiring and installation errors that I'd made during the original installation. I was bypassing the OEM 80W/channel amplifier, and I had a couple of speaker wires crossed up, so the new harness has been triple checked.

Last night I got out a power supply, and connected the old radio and the new radio to see if I could power them up. The new radio was very poorly packed, and I had doubts if it survived the trip, so I wanted to check it out. I connected the old radio first, and damn....it powered up just fine! Must be a problem with the car, then. The radio had the blinking 'standby' light before, indicating it was getting "12 Volts, Always On" which retains the memory, but was 'dead' when you tried to power it up. The signs pointed to either a bad fuse (there are two for the radio), a bad connection, or a bad wire. The new radio also powered up just fine and checked out, so at least I had two known, "good" radios.

This morning I checked all the fuses again, going so far as to remove them, visually inspect them, and continuity check them with my Ohmmeter. All were fine. So I shot the dice, and continued with the installation. Then I disconnected the battery and waited the prerequisite 15 minutes for the "System Capacitor" to discharge, and took the airbag off the steering wheel. I had to do this to replace the two back-of-wheel switches that control the radio, one of which failed a couple of years ago. It would only tune the radio going down in frequency, instead of tuning both ways, but it worked so I let it slide. When I bought the replacement switch for the left side (tuning control) I also bought one for the right side (volume up/down), so since I had it apart, I replaced both of them.

Then I neatened up the bundle of wires on the back of the new radio, and installed it in the dash. Reconnected the battery, and wonder of wonders, it worked! At this point all I can think of is that disconnecting the battery for a couple of hours reset something in a Power Control Module somewhere, or perhaps just pulling and reinserting the fuses did it. All the fuses were in physically excellent condition, and had silicone grease on the contact blades. The Jeep forums have mentioned disconnecting the battery to cure a variety of ills in the WK series of Grand Cherokees, with great success, so maybe that was it.

So it's a mystery for now, but it works, and I have a radio and navigation system again.

AND a nice, clean, used Kenwood DNX771HD to put on eBay.....

First World Problems.....

OMG!! My car stereo/navigation unit died! It's so UNFAIR! How will I get to my pilates class without soothing music-to-drive-by? How will I find my around without my GPS!?!

OH, THE HUMANITY!

Yeah, my damn Kenwood took a dump and went casters up. And of course, the replacement unit has a different connector, so I yanked everything out of the dash the other day, and took my custom wiring harness down to the basement, cut it apart, and I'm busy getting the harness for the new radio integrated into my existing harness. The reason it's a little more complicated than just swapping out the radio is that I have a little iDatalink Maestro unit between the radio and the vehicle wiring harness. The little box lets me use my steering wheel controls to run the radio so I don't have to reach over and tap the screen icons to do things like change the volume, or tune to a different station.

My wife keeps telling me how well I'm taking these little setbacks, like having to fix the car, the mis-steps and side tracks of getting a 'permanent' antenna up, and a host of other things.

All I have to do is look at her, the house, the neighborhood, and the dog, and realize how blessed we are to live here, and I just smile.

"First World Problems", indeed.....

44* and Drizzling.....

Which is slightly better than yesterday, when it was 44* and raining.

So it's a good day to stay inside (no antenna work), hang out with the dog, and not do much of anything.

Had a wonderful Easter Sunday, with all the clan gathered, the BBQ cranking away cooking some carnitas my stepson marinated for a couple of days, and all The Little Ones running around in this big place doing kid stuff and looking for all the hidden "Easter Eggs" with little goodies hidden inside.

Tired kiddies at the end of The Great Hunt.....

Seeing these three going about their 'kid business' is it's own Celebration of Life, and a reminder that even after all us Old Fogies pass on, there will be others to carry the flame for us, as long as we raise them right.

And I think I'll brew up another cuppa, and head down to the workshop to tinker away what's left of this gloomy, drizzly day.

The Raising of the Feedpoint

Kind of appropriate that I'm talking about "Raising" things on Holy Saturday.....

We'll be having The Clan and The Little Ones tomorrow for Easter, so probably no blogging until late Sunday night.

Since a Golden Rule of antennas is to Get Them As High As You Can, I spent some time today adding another section of mast, and sliding the balun assembly up towards the top of the mast, eliminating most of the downlead from the wire to the balun. This raised the feedpoint (where the antenna starts) from about 6', up to about 14'. When the new post gets planted, I'll move these three sections of mast to the new pole, raising the top of the mast to about 20'.

I don't know if eliminating ~3' of downlead does much, but it lets me get almost all of the wire stretched out in a straight line.

And I even ran the counterpoise radials straighter this time.

By the time the "final" version of this gets on-the-air, I should be quite good at it!

This today's plot:

And this is before I raised the feedpoint:

And I ordered some slide together aluminum tubing and a mount from DX Engineering. I'll be building a 'permanent' version of the 20 Meter vertical to mount to the fence, so I can clean up and stow my BuddiStick and tripod back in their bags.

Hope you all have a very happy and Blessed Easter!

"Mark-I" 88' Wire Antenna Improvements

Spent the last two days "Prunin' and Tunin'" on this spin of the antenna, and I think it's about as good as it's going to get.

After looking at the data I collected, and seeing what was going on, I decided to go back to the full 88' length. This gives away some of the nice match it had on 15 Meters (21MHz), but improved it on 20 Meters (14MHz). The match on 40 Meters (7MHz) and 75 Meters (3.5MHz) is still far enough from 50 Ohms that I don't think I'll be able to transmit into it with this radio, but I can live with that for now. The final spin of this antenna will have an autocoupler at the feedpoint, providing a nice 50 Ohm match on all frequencies I intend to use. But for now, I'm getting my feet wet (again) with wire antennas of the non-resonant type. The only other time I've done this, has been with an autocoupler at the feedpoint, and since the radio always saw 50 Ohms, and I didn't own a graphical antenna analyzer, I couldn't measure what the wire by itself looked like, so I didn't care about it. I just put up as much wire as high as I could, and connected it to the SGC-230 autocoupler. So this has been an interesting learning experience, and a good source of exercise the last few days.

Final configuration for the "Mark-I" is:

88' wire, #14 gauge

9:1 balun at feedpoint

4 counterpoise/radial wires. Two are 100' long and six feet above the ground, and two are 50' long, about 2'~3' above the ground. The top ones are mounted to the fence pickets by threading them around every 5th picket or so, and the lower ones in the back run along the mid-height fence stringer, and the North ones are stapled to the fence. Going from two, 50' radials to four 50' radials, and then lengthening the top ones to 100' didn't change the shape of the curve very much, but dropped the curve down, resulting in a better match over the entire frequency range.

Here's the graph of the 'final' Mark-I version.

This would be a very good antenna to use with my little Elecraft K2, as the Elecraft KAT-100 "tuner" can easily match up to a 10:1 mismatch. The big Yaesu can only handle 3:1, so I'm stuck on 20 Meters and above.

For now.....

88' "Mark-I" Antenna Swept Measurements

Now that the wife's friend has returned to SoCal, I can *really* jump back into this wire antenna project.

As I noted last night, this thing has "ears", especially below 20 Meters (14MHz), which is going to be very useful during the Sunspot minimum that's going on right now. And it's also quieter than the vertical ("Vertical Antennas Pick Up More Noise"), which gives me some S/N ratio improvement, always a Good Thing.

This is a sweep of the antenna's VSWR from 3.5MHz to 28.550MHz at the OEM 88' length.

And this is a sweep with the length reduced to 84'.

They look very similar, but notice that the "peaks and valleys" have all moved to the right. This is consistent with a shorter length wire even though this is not a resonant antenna.

The blue vertical lines correspond to the frequencies of the US Amateur Radio bands, which is where I'm allowed to transmit. The left vertical scale is "VSWR", a ratio of applied ("Forward") power to reflected ("Reverse") power, an indication of how well the load is matched to the source. Please observe that this plot has nothing to do with where this antenna resonates. All this plot does is indicate how this antenna compares to a 50 Ohm matched load. A Dummy Load (sometimes called a "Dummy Antenna") would have a perfect 1:1 match from "DC-to-Daylight", and would appear as a flat line on the graph.

Here's what one of my dummy loads looks like:

See the green line at the bottom? VERY low VSWR, indicating an excellent impedance  match, which is why Dummy Loads are very useful for test purposes.

I'm not a guy who obsesses over getting the mythical 1:1 match. It never happens in the real world anyway, except maybe at ONE frequency, so it's not Real World to do that. I'm concerned with the areas below the 3:1 line, and what those frequencies are. This  transmitter will not function properly with a mismatch greater than a bit over 3:1, and dials the power back to a few watts to protect itself. Anything I can do to make the mismatch lower than 3:1 in the frequency bands I use (the blue vertical bars), is a truly great and wondrous thing.

So I futzed around all day shortening the antenna, adding two more counterpoise wires, making measurements and then doubling the length to 100' on the top two counterpoise wires, and taking the measurements again. Had to lengthen the rope at the far end, as shortening the antenna means a longer support rope, and I want enough rope to have the antenna completely slack on the ground, with another 10'. WELL.....as I was getting ready to tie on some more rope, I let got of the existing rope without having the free end tied off. Faster than I could catch it, the antenna dropped the rest of the way to the ground, pulling the support rope completely out of the pulley, and I watched the loose end of it fall to Earth.

GROAN.....had to drop the mast to rethread a new longer rope through the pulley, wasting a bunch of time due to my oversight about using enough rope the other day when I put this up. Oh, well.....beautiful day outside to do this stuff, and dog and I spent time playing ball and chasing wires and the errant squirrel around the yard.

I'll do a "Round 2" post detailing some changes I made today that improved things a bit. I think I see what's happening with the changes I made, and they're right in line with what I know about antennas.

But it looks like 75 Meters (3.5MHz) and 40 Meters (7MHz) will remain out of reach with this configuration, and this tuner in this radio.

Which is precisely why I need to get the SGC autocoupler mounted at the feedpoint.

88' Antenna, "Mark-I" Version

Desperately itching for an antenna that covers more than one band, and with progress on the "final" version of this antenna moving slowly, I bought a premade 88' end-fed antenna from MyAntennas.com a couple of weeks ago. This is one of the 'commercial' end-fed antennas that uses a 9:1 Balun (balanced-to-unbalanced) transformer at the feedpoint to tame the impedance characteristics of a typical non-resonant end-fed antenna.

This afternoon I put my rear-in-gear and installed it using one of the end mounts for the "ultimate" version that's in-work.

This is the feed end , mounted to the newest picket I could find. It's pretty solid, and I have the lower end of the 10' of mast resting on the ground, vs bolting the mast "as high as I could" to the picket.

The feed point is roughly 10' above the ground now. When the new 4x4 post gets set, that mast will be mounted much further up the post, which will raise the feedpoint to 15'.

This is a nicely built antenna, using good quality "kinkless" wire, and (mostly) stainless steel hardware. Reasonably priced at $75, and Made In The USA.

The coaxial cable running to the radio in the large black cable running vertically, the antenna starts at the stud on the right side of the box, and the counterpoise wires are the white wires at the bottom.

 I solved the "How do I attach the counterpoise to the fence?" by threading them through the pickets every so often.

This one turns the corner at the fence, and continues along the back fence.

This one runs away from the antenna about 65. I could easily get 100' leads on the fence, as there's another 25' of fence past what looks like a gate.

The middle of the wire was guyed to the stump of the cottonwood tree we cut down when we moved in here. It's about 17' in the air. This is the tree I want to bore a hole into the top of, and insert a 10' mast. This would get the center about 25' high.

Nothing fancy, just a big screw eye threaded into a pilot hole drilled in the trunk. The "loop" holding the wire is made from Dacron antenna support rope. Hard to see in the picture, but there's several inches of clearance between the wire and the tree.

And the far end uses a mast bolted to the 4x4 fence post. The tension line from the end of the wire goes through a pulley on another loop of Dacron rope mounted at the top of the mast.

And the tension rope is tied off to a cleat. Eventually I'd like to put a counterweight mechanism on the rope to allow the antenna to sway, but this got it in the air today.
 

The coax runs down the mast, and then follows the fence towards the house.

It gets to to where the patio starts, turns, and runs across the gravel area.

Goes under the steps, and off to your right where the entrance box will be.

For now, I'm just using a jumper of RG-8X coax, same as I use on the BuddiStick, to run into the house. I have a multiposition coax switch so I can switch between the two antennas and compare signal strengths.

So how does it work? I haven't swept it yet and plotted the results, but first impressions are good. On 20 Meters (14MHz), sometimes it's better, and sometimes not, compared to the vertical, and depending on where the signal is coming from. But it's noticeably quieter than the vertical, and that by itself is nice.

On 75 Meters (3.8MHz) the difference is astounding. Signals that are S3 to S5 on the vertical jump to S7 to S9, which is something in excess of a 20dB improvement.

Ah, but there's a fly in the ointment, as always. Since the 'tuner' in the FT-1000D can only match up to a 3:1 VSWR, I can't get the radio to load on 75 Meters (3.5MHz) where the match is about 6:1. The radio tries to match it, and gives up.

I haven't tried this antenna on 40 Meters (7MHz) as the radio has a problem on that band.

So, I'll sweep the antenna on Wednesday, see what and where the reactance flips and flops, and probably wind up taking a few feet off the length. My Wire Antenna Guru warned me that 88' can cause some strange effects, and 84' might be better. We expected some issues on 15 Meters (21MHz), but not on 75.

I'm also considering adding the other two pre-cut counterpoise wires I have. When it comes to counterpoise wires and ground radials, more is generally better.

Coaxial Cable Entrance Box

Since the wife is off entertaining her visiting friend, and it's too soggy in the backyard to do much right now, I've been tinkering out in the garage addressing a few items on the "88' Antenna Project" list.

One of which is an "Entrance Box" for the coaxial cable and power/control cable for the SGC-230 autocoupler. Getting cables in and out of a residence can be a tricky thing. Getting them in and out properly, while looking "acceptable", can take a bit more doing. The installation has to be weather proof, and critter proof. I'm going with two 8x8x4 outdoor-rated, plastic electrical boxes. They'll be mounted back-to-back, one inside, one outside, and will give me access to the cables I need, with some "room to grow" in the boxes.

Here's the outside one taking shape.

The box-within-the-box contains a large ferrite core with ten turns of RG-400 teflon coax wound on it, connected to an SO-239 jack. Basically a big honkin' inductance in series with the coax to block any RF currents on the shield of the coax, and keep RF outside the house. There's a 90* adapter on the output jack at the top, and that will be connected via a coax jumper to a long bulkhead feedthrough connector like you see at the bottom of the picture, which will pass through the wall to the inside box.

Since this is a plastic box, I'm using a large stainless steel fender washer as a reinforcement where the bulkhead connector passes through. There's another one that'll be going on the inside of the box after I cut down one side of it. If you look at the bottom edge of the washer, you can see some of it hangs below the edge of the box. That's about how much I have to trim off the other one so it fits in the box. I suppose I could have spaced the isolation choke higher, but I wanted it mounted flat.

The mating box mounted on the inside of the house will have a bulkhead jack on one side of it, and a small cable for power to the SGC coming out. All I have to do to 'safe' the radio is disconnect those two, and we're isolated from the antennas in stormy weather. Both have gasketed lids, and I'll be packing the outside one with Styrofoam for some extra insulation.

These are advertised as "paintable with regular house paint", so we'll paint the outside one to match the siding, and the inside one to match the walls.

So these meet both the Electrical and Wife Criteria, and should work nicely.

And say hello to the newest Radio Stray to take up residence at "Zarkov's Radio Ranch".

It's a little Yaesu FRG-100 General Coverage shortwave receiver in pretty "meh" condition. You should have seen it before the preliminary cleaning I gave it! It was advertised as "Non working because I don't have a power supply for it", so I'm assuming the worst. BUT....seeing as it uses a really oddball DC power connector that even I don't have, I'm temped to believe him. Even if it's mostly toast, I'm only out a little over $40, depending on what's salvageable. If it works, then I'll do a major clean and spit shine on it, as these are quite decent little radios.

Quick update.....I connected the little Yaesu to my power supply with a pair of clip leads, and it works. All the functions work normally, so after a good scrubbing, this little guy will either go on the shelf, or back on eBay, where functional units like this bring ~$200. Not bad for a $40 'investment'.....

30* and Snowing

Quite a change from yesterday when it was 75* and sunny!

My "patio table snow gauge" shows about 4" so far. The ladder up against the tree is so I can get up there and bore the hole for the center mast of the 88' wire antenna. NOT on the schedule today!

And it looks like the trash truck has been by, so time to go brush the cans off and wheel them back into the garage.

The high today was about 45* at 0900, and it's been dropping since then. Expected lows are in the low 20's for the next few nights, with daytime highs in the low to mid 40's.

Be a nice night to crank up the fireplace, pop a DVD into the player, and relax.....

Construction Delayed Due To Spring Cleaning

The wife is having a friend of hers visit for a week, so I agreed to 'stop work' on the antenna after the weekend so I could help with the cleaning required before her friend gets here. I haven't completely stopped, but from outward appearances I'm doin' the Homeowner Thing.

Scrubbed all four bathrooms today; toilets, mirrors, and vanity tops all sparkle. Swept and mopped the floors, too!

Then I proceeded to check the wattage of the light bulbs in the kitchen ceiling fixtures so I could see what was in there, and put in some brighter ones per the wife's request.
10 minute job, right?

WRONG!

Instead of getting my ladder out, I used one of those "light bulb grabbers" on a pole to unscrew the bulb. WELL......the bulb didn't unscrew, the fixture did. Just came plumb apart before my very eyes, it did! I was astonished that someone could have put the fixture together so poorly that the torque requirements to remove a stinking light bulb overwhelmed the prevailing torque of the various screwed together parts of the fixture.

Then I remembered where I was, and started laughing. Every.Single.Thing the previous home owners touched is screwed up. Curtain rod hangers too close together resulting in curtains with huge gaps (and light leaks) to the window sides, towel racks held to the walls with spit-and-spackle, toilet paper holders that ripped out of the wall when you tugged on the roll a little too hard (happened to the wife), and other misadventures of a flip gone wrong.

At least all they touched was cosmetic stuff. Very annoying, but *zero* safety hazards that I've found.

And since we have The Little Guy from early Sunday afternoon to late Monday afternoon, much time was spent pulling his Little Red Wagon around the cul-de-sac, playing with Pebbles in the back yard, and seeing him do his best "WHOA!" when he saw something new out in the garage. We then spent quite some time explaining all the things he pointed at and said "Whazz Dat?". He was bit upset that gramma's car was parked in the driveway instead of the garage, but since it made his wagon (and the stroller) much easier to get out, he pretty much let it slide.

Talked to neighbor about using the auger to bore the hole for the new post that'll be both the end mast and autocoupler mount, and he agreed it was one of those "D'OH!" decisions that we both overlooked until faced with the Magic Disintegrating Fence. And while the post is in the garage, I'll drill some pilot hols for the hardware I'll be using to mount the mast and the coupler box.

And I lucked out and found a Yaesu SP-5 speaker.

This is the "matching" speaker for the FT-1000 and 1000D radios, and looks much nicer than the Palstar I bought to use with the K2. The Palstar didn't work very well with the Yaesu. I had to run the AF Gain (volume) at about 90% or greater to get a decent sound level out of it. If I had the headphones at a comfortable level and pulled them out, you could barely hear the speaker. Very disappointing.

The Yaesu speaker has switchable filters, consisting of capacitors and inductors, allowing you to "roll off" high, low, or both, ends of the audio. They're passive filters, and make a noticeable difference. I also took the cabinet apart and used some stick-on acoustic foam on the insides. It makes the enclosure well-damped, and eliminates annoying "buzzes" and other enclosure resonances.

So we're still plugging along on the "Great 84' End Fed Hertzian Antenna Project", but running at lower capacity for the next week or so while the wife's friend is here.

And I still have two more days to help with chores, and probably get some other home owner issues addressed.