6m antenna is ready

Wednesday afternoon I took some more time to visit the club station at Bldg 4622, and finish the connections for the 6 meter antenna.

Our 5 element 50 MHz antenna on the rotor deck

The coax is secured and weatherproofed, the rotor and thrust bearing is intact. Inside you can see my Yaesu FT-897D from home, along with my MFJ antenna analyzer. The SWR is a respectable 1.8:1 at a resonant frequency of 50.150 … I called CQ on 50.125, but had no response. A short time later tho I did hear someone else, and moved the antenna rotor to improve the signal. I had a brief chat with Ed – K2LCK, who lives on Long Island in New York (FN30)… only 850 miles or so with 50 watts – I thought that a good indicator of success.

FT-897D listening on 50.125 MHz

Even tho I messed up on the date, and we missed the ARRL June VHF Sweepstakes – there is a SMIRK contest this weekend on 6 meters. I came out Saturday morning about 8am, but have only worked two stations so far. First was Barry – KJ4UGO, over in Trinity, AL (EM64). Then just now I worked Don – KC2AQU in Tuckerton, NJ (FM29). I have heard some others down in the noise today, so I suspect the band is gonna be up and down. I may come back out later this afternoon or evening and listen some more.

There is currently some undetermined issue with my outbound email, so any information I sent out last night about my activities here today have not made it to the YahooGroup. Anyway, I’ll try to listen on the 147.100 repeater this afternoon in case anyone is trying to get me there. You can try me on my cell phone once I leave here for lunch, but I’m using it here as a modem to get on the internet to post this…

Thanks  /;^)

My Bad : VHF QSO Party was last weekend ..

Oops – I slipped a week there somewhere and missed the contest. Arrrrrgh !.

Well at least I got the rotor under the beam, and connected to the controller.
That is a good thing because there is actually a different contest this weekend. This one is even a 6 meter contest – SMIRK !! SMIRK.ORG

I’ll post more on this shortly, but wanted to announce my mistake in case anyone was planning to participate, or even just to watch. This SMIRK event runs from 7 pm CDT Friday evening, thru 7 pm Sunday evening.
But don’t just take my word, go check that website.
Apparently I am not always paying attention.
Maybe . . . ?

Thanks  /;^)

VHF rotor update

Last week I found the time to look at the VHF rotor.
This is the one mounted on the antenna deck that we moved to the west side of the building. I believe it had  been used by KB5EZ in his meteor-scatter research, so the expectation was that it might still be usable. I removed the 4 bolts that held the motor to the deck, and took it inside to clean it up a bit.

testing the VHF rotor

After removing the leftover pieces of the control cable

BYO lunch Nov.1

We had a bit of an antenna party after the meeting in early October, and now have the new 160 meter dipole hanging from the pole (the 80m dipole is still there too). We haven’t had much opportunity to check out this new antenna, so some of us are meeting at 4622 during lunch Nov 1st. This off-center-feed dipole (also known sometimes as a Windom) is 264 ft of good stranded copper, and signals seem noticable stronger. We also mounted the 6 meter beam on the new antenna deck, and need to get that rotor connected…

Plenty of stuff to consider and plan our strategy around. Bring your lunch out and join in on the fun. We expect to start about 11am, and will likely be there for a few hours (I need to start my day early for STS-133 launch support, so I’ll be done for the day by lunchtime). Come on down ..!..

/;^)