A productive day!

Today, Friday 21st September 2012, turned out to be a very productive day.

It started with a a quick clean up of the shack, throwing out useless junk and setting up the second workstation in the shack.

It then followed with lesson on how to properly use the FT-1000MP MK V by a very poorly but knowledgeable fellow (EI2JD).  Little did I know that I now have lots to learn!!

The day continued with a few tests of external HDD's, which, incidentally, all turned out to be dead.

We were surprised that we could not get the Antron to tune on 12M but no matter what we did it would not tune.  It  would tune fine on 10M, 15M and 17M.

I did manage to make a couple of QSO's on the 1000MP,  one into Europe and one VR2, both on the Antron 99.

I also hooked up my new Diamond Duplexer for 2M and 70CM.  I was delighted to hear the Dundalk repeater on 70CMs for the VERY first time!  I am looking forward to many QSOs on this new band in the future.

And to cap off the day (it being a beautiful day), we managed to put up Inverted V's for 80M & 40M - photo's will follow.  We clamped a small pole horizontally on the top of the tower and hooked the center of the Inverted V's to it.  On testing, it turns out that the Inverted V's were tuned for the CW portion of both bands.  I need to shorten the elements for SSB use.

I am delighed with how the day went and I still have two more days in this weekend!

73

EI9GTB

Stripping down the TH7DX

So, last weekend I finally got around to working on the TH7DX Tri-Band beam.  Thos (EI2JD) assisted and advised me on what I needed to do to strip each element down to clean all connections and also to strip down the traps to clean and inspect them.

So this image shows two elements with 15M and 10M traps.

 

This is the 10M trap before we stripped it down.

 

 

I have lots more to do and while the first one took quite a considerable amount of time, I suspect that stripping down all the elements, cleaning, gresing and re-assembling will take me some weeks.  Hopefully it will be worth it!

 

More to follow!

 

73



ERC Rotor Control & Rotator

So here is the ERC Rotor control unit hooked up to the Emotator rotaror.

It works a treat and is very easy to operate.  I have it working with a number of rotator control software applications including HRD and WinTest.  I now have to mount the rotator on the tower this coming weeknd and run the lenght of control cable back to the shack.

 

I have had a new bearing made for the rotator cage as the original one had pretty much seized.  The new bearing has bronze inserts which I am told will never sieze!

 

 

With a big of luck and good weather, I should have it all installed and ready for antenna installation this weekend.

 

73



ERC Rotor Control

Some images of the ERC-Rotor-Control Kit

 

Thanks to Oleg (EI7KC) for kindly putting it together and for testing it with my Emotator Rotator.  It is a very neat and tidy rotor control unit.  The rotator can be manually rotated by using the control box or it can be connected to your pc via usb to be automatically controlled by software.

 

The ERC Rotor Control kit costs just €69.00.  

Welcome to my new blog!

Hey, welcome to new blog.  I hope you will visit here often and that you find my ramblings useful or amusing, maybe even both!!