tech.faħmu.net

Long article and many comments on grounding
PolyPhaser article on Ham grounding

so, i was told (thanks KT6LN!) that just because an antenna can tune with an autotuner, does NOT mean it is radiating. I kind of suspected this.. of course a dummy load can tune up.. Anyways, armed with that knowledge, I used a coathanger as a test instead of cutting up my radiating element. Much better! Better than 1.5:1 across the band with no tuner. Then, I cut the wire, and now i am waiting for the rain to let up so I can try tuning it again. Looks like the bandwidth is such that I can have ssb OR cw but not both.

Click here..

Ben has his new hustler antenna mounted in the truck .. just needs tuning. (clicky)

Also: I’ve added photo links to many of the ‘old’ articles. You might want to check them out.

the raid disks came! initial tests were going well, except the LEDs wouldn’t fire. But, on trying to build the RAID system, one of the new disks is showing unrecoverable errors. Looks like the spare drive is going to be used much sooner rather than later.. Specs: 5 * 250GB SATA, western digital. Promise SATA-II TX4 card (four SATA channels), and 5-bay SATA drive cage. Interestingly, the drive trays don’t even have connectors on them, the disks themselves slide right into the backplane.
RAID array will be RAID-5 over the four disks, so 750GB (counting fake gigabytes). Linux is FC3 + promise controls.

the wrt 802.11g router came! it’s working well.. i was disappointed that it couldn’t be a dhcp client on the LAN ports. But i’ll get over it.

got the icom ic-706mkiig, hf/ 6m / 2m / 440 xcvr.. the remote cable’s not quite long enough to go from the trunk to the front of the car. actually haven’t used it in the car yet, just on the table.. definitely a nice rig.

Downside: has two ant jacks, “HF/50″ and “VHF/UHF”. Plugging in my triband 50/Vhf/uhf antenna will be an issue..

this past weekend we tried out the Gtech Pro Performance Meter which the Manufacturer says can measure:
0-60 time ±1/10th/sec, 60-0 braking distance ±2ft, 1/4 mile ET ± 1/10 second, 1/4 mile speed ± 1 mph, Horsepower ±3HP, Instantaneous G’s ± 2/100th of G, Continuous G’s ± 2/100th G. Pretty accurate little box.

current thinking on the car is to run armored liquid-tight conduit from the trunk to the dash area, underneath the car. Want to get something large enough to pass a USB cable, cat-5, and a ICOM 306 remote cable through. Power will probably go separate- maybe not, though.

so after burning my finger on solder producing a reflex action which smacked my wrist against the wooden frame with enough force to send me to the doctor to x-ray the non-broken bone.. all just before church started..

.. i finally finished the monitor speaker. had to resolder the XLR connector, after carrying it around in my pocket looking for mounting screws.. hot glue was dug up and used to fix the wires. An oversized volume knob was put on..

click for photo, and click Next from that page..

so bees has been mounted and put in the rack.
photos here.
more photos here and following