Category: Amateur Radio

It’s nice to get out of the basement!

For the last couple of weeks I have been working on a new home office.   We took the carpet out of one of the empty bedrooms, painted the ceiling (thanks, Rob!) and walls, and I put in a bamboo wood floor.   After putting the trim is back in place, I ran phone, Ethernet and coax cable to a wall jack and moved my work laptop up here.   Now all I need to do is find some suitable furniture, as the computer table I am borrowing is really not the right height.

It’s looking like I may finally get a working ham station too.   There is a good sized window over the back yard, with a good run to two maple trees.   I had plans to run a number of end-fed half wave wires to the trees, but have decided to just run one end-fed wire instead and use a tuner.   I managed to toss a temporary run of around 70′ or so into one of the trees, and the rig’s internal tuner managed to match it OK on several bands.   Haven’t tried any contacts yet, maybe if I get a chance today.

Of course now I have to clean up the basement area where I had been working.   Ugh.

I’ve been completely absorbed in trying to get a new product finished. I’ve already pretty much committed to making it to Dayton this year with inventory to sell. I have all fo the basic stuff working, and quite a few of the “whiz-bang” new features that no one else has. I keep hammering at getting the code finished, or at least to the point where I feel comfortable to taking it to Dayton.

I have been hacking away at this code (which is now somewhere upwards of 7,000 lines of C) for months.   The last couple of weeks I’ve been doing that and virtually nothing else.   I can now copy a limited set of Morse characters at over 20 WPM, sometimes 30…   and I still have not been on the air in a couple of years.

So, if you know me, I apologize for being completely out of the loop.

Wow. Yesterday it was 50 or above, snow melting, got the antenna feedpoint re-connected and actually grilled hamburgers on the gas grill outside! Pete took the dog out to the dog park, which was followed by a bath since he (Buddy, not Pete) came home looking like one giant mudball. What a nice day. Of course we had a small pond forming in the back yard, the joy of living at the bottom of a hill.

Now it’s 10 or below, the pond is now a glacier of solid ice, and it’s snowing. Wind is blowing like mad, it’s just cold as hell.

or did the snow come about a week or two too early this year? I wasn’t quite done with things in the back yard when it started. I’m hoping we get a reprieve, maybe just a few days of decent temperatures with the snow melted off. I’ve got antenna work to finish!!