The Crud

Missed two days of work and had a new radio, barely got it hooked up-it's a pisser actually to be sick when you take  sick days!  Between bouts at the porcelain throne I got some contacts on 17 and 40, 20 stll the go to band, tuner is still cranky on 40 and depends on how I drape the counterpoise so a new build is in order-Lord how I hate winding coils!     
                                   73 de Rob

It's Almost Like I know What I'm Doing

Preparing for a new multi-band radio-don't worry sport fans still low power- multiple half waves above 40M and a Hi and Lo Z tuner from junque for 10 to 80, works on 20M so far. What could go wrong? Still LL crap!
73 de Rob

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

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.

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

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