Club News

It’s hamfest season!

One of the first signs of spring in Central Ohio is the Mansfield Hamfest! DELARA has a wide variety of members who are experts in their part of this great hobby. Our undisputed hamfest expert is Steve Coe, K8SWH who can sell a boatanchor to a landlubber. He and Prez Tim were behind this year’s effort at Mansfield. Gary, KE8O, was also able to catch Dave, WB2CWJ, energetically manning the booth! Prez Tim launched his new enterprise, selling a dozen or so embroidered hats. (He can make you a deal!)

DMR Down Again

Operating a repeater isn’t cheap! Purchasing the box and accessories, setting it up then keeping it running can be a full time job- and it can take whatever cash you have to throw at it. And sometimes, it gets worse. Consider the plight of the Delaware DMR repeater- it has been down again for a while apparently with the same issue: blown finals. What makes you shake your head is this is the ~third~ Motorola repeater that’s happened to. The antenna is new, fed with hardline. This ought to be a bullet-proof system. Ken Snare will be working on returning this to the airwaves… but it might be a while.

Works fine if you tilt your head a

little…

Our Ken got a call that any repeater operator dreads: “Hey Ken, your antenna doesn’t look right…” And so, it doesn’t: Ken says it looks like the top bracket sprung. Going to have to contact a tower guy to make that right. In the meantime, it works just fine- even better if you tilt your head just a little. :-)

March Meeting: Let’s get analytical!

About the only thing a ‘common’ ham can affect when it comes to improving our performance is the antenna! Radios are plug and play, too small for many of us to consider opening up. But we can still inexpensively grab some wire, an insulator and balun and string together all sorts of magic! For many of us, it’s simply a process of cut and guess… and watch whether our rig will auto-tune. But there are better ways to figure these things out- and the chief tool to do that is the antenna analyzer! It can give us way more than just SWR - and much of that is very useful if we understand how to get the information. Dale Bauer, W8KTQ, is no stranger to working with antennas, and fortunately for us he’s no stranger to applying the tools! Come get a dose of “what’s in the box” at our March meeting!

More than bats in the attic!

I happened to be putting some things into the attic tonight and thought I would take a couple of photos on my indoor antenna farm to share with our newer members. (I know from the looks of the attic I should be taking things out instead of adding more). What I call the attic is really an unfinished bonus room over the garage , There is a second attic that runs over the second story living space that is tall enough for me to stand up and walk down the center. I did not take any photos of this space. But I have two 2m/70cm verticals, a 6m halo, and the other half of my 10m thru 80m dipole exist in this area. Here's a photo of my 6m, 2m and 70cm beam antenna in the bonus room (attic) The next photo is my 10m thru 80m trap dipole. This runs just under the ridge beam of the roof line. The traps are home brew made using rg58 coax wound around various sized PVC couplers. I found the antenna design in an old QST article. I tried to identify each of the traps with a text bubble. This shows approximately one half of the antenna. My furthest contact on this antenna was ZL3RG mode PSK31 on 2007/05/07 @ 03:01 UTC. running 20w. I'm sure that was near the peak of some sunspot cycle. As they say.... any antenna is better then no antenna... the bigger the better... and if you can't hear em you can't work em (might not hold true with the advent of FT8).