Club News

Antennas are always fun! (And frustrating!) Bob, W8ERD, files this report about getting his antenna arrays back up to snuff- with the help of some friends! Today Steve Coe K8SWH and Dave Lewis K8DL very kindly came over to help me with some antenna projects. 1. My 2 M antenna has wildly varying SWR when it rains. We took it apart and found the base joint was wet inside. We dried it with a heat gun and sealed it up. Unfortunately the SWR is still 5:1. Then we had a great lunch of pizza and brownies provided by my great wife Judy. 2. We then installed a nanostation mesh node on my mast. We used some cat 5 cable that was much too long and had to be dragged thru my crawlspace by hero Dave. I can now connect weakly to the Ostrander node. Bob W8ERD And to guarantee the antennas would work- the traditional pizza!

Batteries!

This is something I know a little about. I led the IoT monitoring of ~40 million batteries around the world in UPS duty for data centers, fiber sites, cell sites, and telecom site and tracked the wear out for backup generators, UPS, batteries, air units, etc for a long time. The world is certainly moving to Lithium, but unless you have a space and weight challenge, the benign nature of lead acid batteries, particularly AGM (semi-sealed absorbed glass mat) are on par and often less costly. If you are thinking about this, I suggest the following. You can get dual conversion high efficiency UPS’s that are designed to carry you load and at the same time, they FULLY isolate your critical gear from the AC lines. Here is one example I just nabbed from eBay without looking too hard (probably assembled or at least shipped) out our Delaware facility on Pittsburgh Dr. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Liebert-GXT4-2000RT120-Uninterruptible-Power- Supply/313132201029?hash=item48e8223445:g:1SEAAOSw05Ve-4hT They work like this: AC Power In > Convert AC into DC (not just rectify and filter) > Battery subsystem > Convert DC to AC > distribute power and protect These UPS are designed to run for 10 years. From my experience a 12 volt investors are terribly unreliable; they are generally not designed for long term use and the definitely are not RF quiet, surge energy capable, etc. Why buy a worn out UPS on eBay? The batteries wear out in these in about 3 years. The UPS is often in fantastic shape. As to batteries, they take AGMs like emergency lights take—these are super low cost and everywhere. Alternatively, you could put four (or more) car batteries in in series to power the GXT4. These GXT4s (as likely are our competitors units from APC) are tanks. The batteries just expire. I have GXTs here at home, one in the shack, one on the sump pump, one at my home work desk; and run with 95% efficiency. Sorry, I am selling on dual conversion technology. I am just a little proud of great products from our hometown company, Vertiv. By the way, that plant has the worlds largest UPS testing facility—they can test loads up to 10 megawatts—surges, dips, shorts(a 10 megawatt short circuit test is impressive!), spikes, RF, tempest, etc, Happy to discuss more if you are curious Greg, NZ8R

Scouts and ham radio

Thank you for letting us use the 19 machine for Jamboree on the Air at Camp Lazarus. I had the radio tuned to it and heard someone key up on digital. I wasn't sure what mode was being used, so I keyed up the mic and asked. Then through conversation asked him to use mt632kl. Several scouts talked to him. He was getting his equipment ready for a Diginet, I assume one that is on your repeater. I don't recall his call sign, but his name was George and he lives in Centerburg. He said he uses digital modes more than talking on a microphone. I think we may have suprised him being on 2m when he was getting his equipment ready for the Diginet. He was great for the scouts to talk to and we appreciated him taking time to have a good QSO with the scouts. We were also able to talk to John, KE8JHH just outside of Marysville on 2m simplex from Camp Lazarus using a Jpole mounted on a tripod on 5 watts using both MT632KL and Voice. On the HF side, we used PSK31 on 20 meters. We talked to a station in Florida, California, and Colorado. The scouts seemed to really get into using digital modes. We also had 2 CW practice oscillators. Bob from the Madison County Amateur Radio Club worked with the scouts to send their name in CW. The younger scouts seemed to really get into using the practice oscillators and doing their best to send CW by looking up letters on the Morse code paper to send, not just using them to make noise! This year was different because there weren't anyone staying in the cabins at Camp Lazarus. As a result, there weren't as many cub scouts around during the day. We had fewer scouts stop by the JOTA station, but most were older scouts and and a few were younger cub scouts. The older scouts were interested in radio and spent a fair amount of time having a QSO with PSK31 ON 20 meter and MT632KL on 2 meter. A couple scouts stopped by twice to use FLDIGI. Joe, K8JWL from Union County Amateur Radio Club helped me setup the HF antenna and popups on Thursday. Bob, WD8NVN from the Madison County Amateur Radio Club worked with CW, Grant K8BCI from Marion helped out where needed. All three of us set up the tables, equipment and organized the handouts. My wife Jean, KE8JHN brought us lunch and helped out talking with the scouts and adult leaders. My oldest son Jackson (who isn't licensed ��) did a good job explaining how repeaters work, how HF signals propogate, and general over view of how how digital modes with FLDigi worked using a keyboard and sending/recieving text with a radio and computer to the scouts. 73, -Ed, KE8ANU