It's Friday, the Start of a "Grounding and Bonding" Weekend!

 Sorry, but not FFF like Irish hands out.

Going to try and plant the first of my three ground rods tomorrow, and I'll be using my "Deep Root Watering" yard tool so I can at least get the first 30" of rod slid in before I use my ground rod driving attachment in a demolition hammer to drive it in the rest of the way.

Watering device:

This isn't the exact one I have, but it's very similar. It's a steel tube with a hard point on the end, and three holes to let the water out. You turn the water on a bit, and then push it down into the dirt, which usually dissolves and moves out the way, allowing you to insert the rod down to about 30". Unless you hit a rock, in which case you lift it up, move it a few inches, and start over. I'll leave the water on a trickle for a few hours like when I water the trees, and hopefully enough will collect in the soil so the remaining 6' of ground rod can be driven in.

And this yard has LOTS of rocks in places! It usually takes me three or four tries over by the ash tree before I can get the rod inserted beyond 6".

Once you have the hole made, you insert the ground rod, tap it down until it hits the bottom of your new hole, and drive it in the rest of the way using an adaptor:

In a demolition hammer:

I've done this before, and using the power tools is far better than battering the end of the ground rod with a sledge! It's also reeeal hard to smack a ground rod that's still 6' out of the ground and waving around in the breeze while you're trying to stand on a ladder. With another set of (gloved) hands to help keep the rod vertical, you just hold and guide the demo hammer, and let it do the work.

At the top of the ground rod will be a set of solid copper plates that clamp the rod, and allow me to mount the surge suppressors, as seen below, fully assembled.

This will be mounted at the house, just below my "Coaxial Entrance Box", where the cables enter the house.

At the base of each of the two 4x4's I'm planting as antenna supports will be another ground rod/surge suppressor, and those two rods will be bonded together with some #2 solid-copper wire. I'd go the full "Perimeter Ground" route, but the cost of the copper would be excessive, and there might be a code issue with bonding it to the main house ground, aka "Utility ground", which is usually how it's done.

More pix to come as work progresses.

Great Post From Stilton!

 If you haven't seen it, I recommend you go read it.

It's over at Stilton's Place.

OK, Back To Basics

 I kinda liked the SciFi theme, but nobody else did.

So to keep my half-dozen readers happy, I went back to a simple theme....

Not Sure If I Like This New Background...

 Yeah, it looks more SciFi than the equations on the blackboard one, but I don't like the interface to post new entries. AND, I lost my "Blogs I follow" list, and my "Link-O-Rama".

If I can get those back, I *might* keep this. Otherwise, I'll just go back to the "Classic" interface.

New Revolution in Cuba?

 Just heard on my ham radio chat group[s that the Internet is down in all of Cuba, and people are in the streets by the thousands.

Not sure where or when this was taken, but it was posted in the Ham radio group on FB.

From Twitter comes video of the "Black Berets" getting involved.

I'm tuning around the shortwave bands trying to get some info...

13 Colonies Amateur Radio Event -Recap-

 Well, I finally got the operating desk rearranged, got the new matching unit wired in and configured, and went in search of the 13 Colonies stations. This event in held yearly, the first week of July, and this year I thought I'd give it a try. Please excuse the crude wood blocks propping up the front of the radio. They were expedient, and will be replaced with something that looks nicer. And I have "RipTies" stuff I'm going to use to tidy up the cables dangling behind the desk.

There are 13 stations, plus three "bonus" stations, and whether you work one of them, all of them, or all with the bonus stations, you can get a nice certificate.

Some people sniff at it for being a "Participation Trophy", but events like this are very good for contacting states with few Hams, like Vermont. One of the QSL cards I have from Vermont says "Vermont-----AT LAST!"  across the top of the card. There are "Official" awards issued but the ARRL for things like "Worked All States", "Worked All Continents", "Worked All Zones", and at the top of the awards heap is the "DX Century Club" (DXCC), for people who have confirmed contacts with at least 100 countries. And within these individual awards are endorsements for things like making all of the contacts on each of the five "Classic" Amateur Radio bands, namely 80 Meters, 40 Meters, 20 Meters, 15 Meters, and 10 Meters, a total of at least 500 contacts. A friend of mine has the "Worked All States" award with a special endorsement for doing it on 6 Meters, the 50MHz band. It took him over 10 years to do it, but he did. Some people have spent decades "Chasing Paper", but I've never really done it. I had 42 states confirmed as a Novice in 1964, and most likely have worked all 50 states, but not all from the same location.

Anywhoo......A special event or other contest is a good way of seeing how good your station is, as the bands are crowded, and the signals range from "ESP Level" to "Blow Your Headphones Off", and it can be very hard to make contacts. A very strong ("S9" or better) station 1kHz away from a station only 5 or 6dB above your ambient noise level can be extremely difficult to receive. My little K2, while a very good, single-conversion design, gets all flummoxed under these conditions, and can actually be unpleasant to operate at times.

So how did the new Yaesu perform? Spectacularly. I've had a lot of radios over the years, both high-end, and bare-basics, and this rig is the best I've ever owned. The filtering is superb, and with the DSP, you can easily reduce the bandwidth to 1500 Hz, and still understand the other station. I can easily hear a weak station 1~2kHz away from a strong station, with no "Bleed Over" or funny Donald Duck sounds.

And I was able to contact 11 of the 13 stations, and one bonus station. I missed both North and South Carolina because I could never hear them, even using the "spots" on the DX Clusters to locate what frequency they were using.

Happy Independence Day!

 No, I haven't done that, but I applaud the men who did for their courage and bravery.

Anyway.....

  We don't celebrate the date, we celebrate the event which occurred on the date.

I know I don't have to tell this to the people who stop by here, as we also say "Merry Christmas", and not "Happy Holidays". I think we lost something when people started  celebrating the date, and not the reason. To most, it's just another day off work or school, and a reason to stuff yourself with food and drink, and that's sad. 

And I think it's a major part of what happened to get us into the condition we are now.

Enjoy the date, but please, remember the reason.

When Motor Oil Went From Cans To Bottles

 Another "I Remember...." story, sent to me by some friends.....

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Once upon a time, oil came in metal cans you had to pierce with a spout, so it was a surprise when I went to work at the filling station one day and they had motor oil in new plastic containers with a twist off cap. I wondered why no one had thought of it sooner. It was not long until I had a customer that asked me to check the oil. In the "good old days" we pumped gas, washed windshields and checked tire pressure upon request. The customer's car was low on oil and they requested a top up, so I got one of the new bottles of oil, twisted off the cap and put the neck of the container directly into the opening of the valve cover.

When I opened the bottle, I noticed it had a tamper proof cap, and the lower half twisted off while remaining on the bottle. When I pulled the bottle out of the valve cover, to my surprise, the lower half/plastic ring was gone! Where did it go? It had slipped off and fell into the valve cover. I sheepishly informed the customer that I could not see the plastic ring and would have to take off the valve cover to remove it. He was nice about it and gave me the go ahead so I pulled the car into the shop and proceeded to remove the cover. There were five of those rings in there! Apparently others had the same problem with the ring slipping off the bottle and either did not notice or did not say anything. The customer went away happy though.

Shortly after that, motor oil manufacturers seemed to revise their bottles so the ring stayed with the cap. I wondered why no one had thought of it sooner.

 

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I was a gas-pump jockey at a Sunoco Station a friend's Dad owned, but it was well before oil came in plastic bottles. He allowed me to pump gas, take payments, and clean the windshields. I could check the oil and air, but not add oil or fill tires, which required one of The Guys from the service bays to do. After a while, they convinced the owner I was smart enough to do these things properly, which he allowed, about two weeks before the summer ended, and I went back to school. My "primary" summer job was at a little electronics place, but my friend asked me if I could help, and I said sure.

Six Days for UPS Ground from Denver?!?

 Granted I ordered it Friday afternoon, but once it was picked up it sat in the UPS place over the weekend, and then took TWO DAYS to get to Loveland, where it sat for another 24 hours before they put it on a truck to bring up here.

I'm not mad at the seller, or the driver, but UPS, as a whole, seems to have gotten pretty sucky lately. I was sent shipping notices, including the dreaded "Delayed" notice, but as much as I hate driving to Denver, the next time I need something from HRO, I'm tempted to just drive down there and pick it up.

 

And after receiving damaged goods packed and shipped by a UPS "store", I never use them. FedEx has always been my first choice, and will remain so, but sometimes you don't have that option when you buy something on-line.

Field Day, 2021

 And for the first time since we moved here, I'm participating! I'm running in Class "1 Delta", which means 1 transmitter, at home, running on commercial power. If I was running on my little Honda generator, then I'd be class "1 Echo", which means 1 transmitter, running on emergency power.

It's a very good test of the new radio, as the bands are crowded (Field Day brings LOTS of people out), with a mix of very strong, and very weak, signals. Earlier today I talked to my friends on the Iowa, and was able to get through on 17 Meters (18MHz) after they could barely hear me on 20 Meters (14MHz) due to a very high local noise level, "QRM" in Ham-speak.

I've only been operating for a few hours, and have collected 18 different states, and even "rag-chewed" a bit with some of the operators.

So far the new radio working very well. I can pull weak stations out of the noise, and reject strong stations just a few kHz away. The Digital Noise Reduction and Noise Blanker are the best I've ever used, very smooth, and they don't introduce a lot of "artifacting" to the audio.

I still haven't learned to use all the wanted signal enhancement and unwanted signal rejection features of this radio, and this is a good time to learn them, and practice with them.

There are some nits and quibbles with some of the features on the radio, but as far as "Basic Receiver Performance", Yaesu knocked it out of the park this time.

RAIN!

 Finally getting some much needed rain after several weeks of dry and sometimes 100* weather.

So far my rain gauge indicates .05" for the last two days. I sometimes doubt the accuracy of my rain gauge, so I bought a "NOAA Approved" model that I can use to dump a "calibrated" amount of water into the collection bucket on the weather station and see how accurate it is.

My rain gauge is of the "Tipping Bucket" type, and when calibrated they're quite accurate.

The rain falls into a collector can, and then drips through the hole in the center into the little buckets inside.

Collector:

 Tipping buckets:

 Each time the bucket tips, it trips a switch sending a "One Bucket Received" signal to the controller, incrementing the rainfall measurement by one unit. In my case, each tip of the bucket indicates .01" of rain received.

I'll fill the "Calibration Device" with water, and pour it into my collector and see if they agree. After I make my measurements, I'll delete the record in the database for the rainfall so as not to skew the data set by a 1" rain measurement.

I'm beginning to think you can't trust your eyeballs when it comes to determining the amount of rain you get. An inch of standing water in a pan outside after a storm passed by doesn't necessarily mean you received 1" of rain.

Just another thing to wrap my head around while I try and understand (or "grok", if you will) this particular aspect of meteorology.

Hope y'all have a good weekend!