Altivo

My antenna has been defective for months now. The feed line had broken loose from the radiating elements, making the whole thing useless. Last fall I ordered a commercial replacement, a somewhat better-constructed version of the same design, but when it came the bad weather had already set in. Lowering a 100 foot long antenna and raising a replacement in ice and snow... Well, it could be done of course, but I didn't need it that badly.

One of the things on my to-do list for this week was to finally get the old antenna down and the replacement up. Did that today. It turned out to be easier than I'd expected. In spite of the fact that the nylon ropes holding up the old one had been in place up in the trees for ten years, they still were strong and had not bound up in the bark so they slipped right down. We figured out how we had threaded the 102 feet of copper wire through the tree branches last time, and by using the old lines to pull the new ones into place, and then the new lines to raise the copper, we got it up there. The old one worked so well that I'm quite confident this will be great.

(For the radio geeks, it's a G5RV style doublet, full sized, with 450 ohm ladder line feed from an air-core coaxial balun. 102 feet on top, height above ground about 36 feet, orientation roughly NW-SE. I use a pi matching circuit for low power operation on HF, 80-10 meters. The orientation seems to help me work into Europe and the South Pacific easily, but Africa and Asia are not quite so good. And it won't sing on top band. I need to do something else for that.)

Now to replace the 2 meter vertical. I really need something for both 2 m. and 70 cm. And I've never had a 6 m. antenna at all...

Enough. There's a thunderstorm here, need to close stuff down.

Typical blah Monday. Staffing is going to be short (as usual) this week at work. Getting so this is a regular thing.

Thanks to several folks on radiofurs I've got some basic ham software going under Linux now so hopefully I can get away from having to run Windows on VMware in order to have control of the transceiver and soundcard. Band conditions are not great, at least, not on 40 meters. I did put a few calls out, and I think there were a couple of responses but they were so far down under the general noise that I couldn't read them for sure. Oh for a few sunspots. Hopefully we've about hit bottom on that and will start seeing some improvement by the end of the summer. At the moment I should flip the switch on the radio and do some other stuff that is more urgent.

Got up into the 40s today, which is almost seasonal, but I guess it's going back down with rain and snow by tomorrow night. Sigh.

( Ham radio geekery behind cut )

Cleared up today and we had sun all day. It's cold, though. C'mon, it's mid-April almost. We should be getting over this freezing nights and chilly days stuff. Even the daffodils looked cold, trying to close themselves back up. Did just small stuff at work this morning, and now a long weekend. Not that I'll be relaxing a lot, too many things that need to get done. Dull stuff, like ironing and housecleaning. A newsletter to get out and a writing project to finish. Oh well, at least the cold is finally losing its grip on my insides.

I sure hope there's a chance to get some rest this weekend, 'cause this has already been too long a week.

Tomorrow the directors of the rebel libraries come to meet at our location because we'll be so shorthanded that my boss didn't want to be unavailable if we were hardpressed. And it's the day when elementary school classes visit, sometimes as many as five or six classes during the day, which is an absolute zoo (and not in a good sense.)

Spent my morning setting up a computer in the meeting room so that the directors can use it to draft their documents during the meeting. Then writing down a list of carefully explained reasons why we find the proposed software of the merged groups unacceptable (that wasn't hard, but making it coherent and clear was time consuming.)

Then off to a study group meeting from my spinning guild. Got home after 4 pm and had to clean barns and feed everyone and bed them down. It's cold here. I have the woodstove going now, and though it's not even 9 pm, I really need to go to sleep. Something about the day has really worn me down.

Oh, and a small fun thing. My certificate and membership card for QCWA (the Quarter Century Wireless Association) arrived in the mail, which means they accepted my qualification for membership. It's an organization for radio amateurs who have been licensed for at least 25 years. (Or more properly, who were licensed at least 25 years ago and are licensed today. Lapses in between are permitted, though mine has been continuous.)