Thursday, February 24, 2011

Toda & Laila Tov

Hits almost reached 1000 last month-999! What is interesting is the readership is 3:1 Israel vs. the rest of the world-Whats up with that? 73 de Rob

GIVE TO THE SALLY FOR THE KIWIS

Give till it hurts!
73 de Rob

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Tis a Puzzlement (Update)

It was my carbon footprint on the sun,click the link for audio. 73 de Rob

PS Set the Spaceweather archive for 2/13/11 for the audio.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Propagation, Tis a Puzzlement

Erratic propagation today, into N. Italy, New England, the Midwest, central Canada, Texas (of course!) and Florida with good signals, then, in the middle of a QSO with Bob, W1ARL, things went flat and the QRN was a steady S-5 to S-7 hiss and nobody was there. No doubt Al Gore would blame it on my carbon footprint. I mean, according to him it effects the sun's output-hence global warming, oops, no, my bad, climate change. So it must be why there are not enough sunspots. I'm sure there is nothing to the Maunder Minimum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum. Cold and no band openings guess I could build a LF rig. 73 de Rob

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Low Power Crummy Antenna-Sounds So Much Better Than Pissweaker

This looks like a crummy antenna, a few of you old RTOs may recognize it from the FM for the A/NPRC-25/77 series field radios, funny thing is its the same antenna at my QTH. Pushing it is a 70's era radio at 5 watts and twenty year old Rat Shack CB mike. It does sit inside but would work the way it looks. The tuner is a breadboarded mashup of odd parts and tuning is done by volume of noise on recieve (I've said before you can treat these MFJ rigs like tube gear!) copper knife switch for grounding and you could use this setup for a 1950's QST article. I could have gone prettier and more powerful but didn't want to bend the budget (If I ever take the plunge it'll be for a Morgan 41). Rob, KB7PWJ had an articlehttp://www.arrl.org/files/file/Technology/tis/info/pdf/9812057.pdf where he referred to such lash ups as LPCA stations (low power crummy antenna), sounds so much better-Thanks OM, 73 de Rob