bryan wann :: binary fury

This morning I ventured up to Belton to the hamfest. It was an early crowd, when I got there at 11:30 people were already packing up their tables and leaving. Some new kit, but mostly old odd gear. I decided a while back I wasn’t going to get a Yaesu ATAS-120 after readng the horror stories of what happened to them after they were left in the rain. I had my eye on a Little Tarheel II which had received solid reviews. Today at the hamfest, a vendor had one, so I bought it.

It’s a slick little unit, looks very well constructed. The coil + 32″ whip made it about 10″ too long to mount on top of the truck bed rail, which left the rear bumper. The when the unit is tuned to 6 meters, the coils are about 6″ below the side of the truck. Being the impatient cheap sort I am, I made my own bumper extension mount to swing the antenna off to the side. The thing appears to be designed to only be mounted via a 3/8″ stud mount, which seems really lightweight to me.

The Tarheel is a motorized screwdriver-type antenna, which means it has to be tuned to match whatever band I’m operating on. I suspect this is going to get really old really fast, because I have to tune the antenna by ear. When I pulled out the switch kit, it has this klunky momentary DPDT rocker switch — not exactly high tech. This is opposed to the ATAS which is designed to be tuned with the FT-857D; push a button and it automatically tunes for you. This has me looking for automatic tuners that work with the FT-857D, namely the Antenna BOSS.

Anyways, I hooked it all up tonight to play with it. From my apartment I wasn’t picking up anything interesting so I drove out to the end of the street. 60 meter was active, I picked up six conversations; there was some mild background static noise, but the voice was easy to hear. From listening to conversations and recording some callsigns I determined there was a group in Virginia, Michigan, and New Jersey; another pair in Arizona and California, another pair in San Diego. Googling tells me one was the “3.955 Ragchewers Group”. I couldn’t figure out what the San Diego guy was doing, he kept calling out K6VO over and over .. I don’t know if he was working DX or some sort of contesting.

After careful consideration, I’ve decided the ham radio community is exactly like the Linux community. Except instead of teenagers, you’re dealing with fairly articulate greybeards. People who take themselves way too seriously, more with strong opinions that can’t *possibly* be proven incorrect, and lots of smackdown to anyone who is unaware or ignorant (usually newbies) of some bit of information. I can’t believe there is so much hate for CB people from hams; moreso I can’t believe it keeps getting constantly rehashed over and over. “It’s just a radio,” isn’t it?

I picked up my FT-857 on Thursday along with fix’ns to wire it up in the truck. I went with LMR-400 Ultraflex cable because I’m clearly a yuppie with a dispoable income. The stuff is certainly beefy, almost a half-inch in diameter. Putting on PL-239 ends was easiler (a new 80 W soldering iron helps) since it was harder to burn through all two (!) layers of shielding and inner core. I gave in and took a drill to my truck’s bed railing and mounted a 140/440 Diamond antenna. Someday I’ll figure out antenna duplexing and ditch the other whips.

I resisted buying the matching ATAS-120 HF antenna. From what I read on eHam.net, there’s enough people having problems with their units when they get wet to make me apprehensive about owning one. I may wind up buying a Little Tarheel or something similar.

One thing I’m already missing with the 857 is a keypad for direct frequency entry. The solution to this appears to be a new mic with a built-in keypad. Operating the 857 definately requires cracking open the manual. Having used the 7R for a few weeks now, I sort of get how Yaesu’s interface works, but they still throw in some surprises on the 857.

I drove up to Oklahoma on Friday. I hit some nasty traffic congestion in Dallas, which took two hours to go through. On the way up I hit up army surplus in Killeen and bought a thigh holster for my HK. While slogging through traffic in Plano, I stopped by Texas Towers to check out their store. I have no idea where the promising local mom & pop radio store is in Dallas, this place wasn’t that interesting at all.

On the way up I also bought a 26′ dipole antenna. At the very least I hope I can use that on my balcony at my apartment. I rigged it up in my parents’ backyard to the 857. It was neat to finally see my radio come to life on HF and scan around the bands. I heard quite a few stations transmitting high speed Morse code, but too fast for me to understand it. I need a decoder of some sort.

Tonight I added 76 feet worth of wire and extended the dipole out to 102 feet, which is about 3/8 wavelength at 80 meters. I almost ran out of yard, 100 feet is roughly 1/3rd of a block. I see now why dipoles are made of 14 gauge wire, it takes a lot of tension to hold 102 feet of cable horizontally flat.

The new extended dipole picked up quite a few more Morse conversations on the lower frequencies. Somewhere down on 160 meters I heard a couple of guys ragchewing, but I didn’t figure out where they were at. Tooling around in the broadcast AM radio bands I picked up stations from San Antonio, Galveston, Dallas, and St. Louis (all hundreds of miles away). The big thing I was after was propogation beacons. Even with the hugeass dipole (and using all CW, SSB/AM, USB, LSB, FM modes) I wasn’t picking up anything on 5m, 10m, 20m nor any of the NCDXF beacons. I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, the atmosphere just sucks this weekend, if the dipole needs to be more than 8′ off the ground, or what.

I went to the ham shop (“the candy store”) on Saturday all excited because I was going to buy a Yaesu FT-857D for the truck. Much to my disappointment, they were all sold out as of Friday. I hope to have my grubby hands on a unit this week sometime. I hear the Belton hamfest coming up is pretty hot, I’m curious to see what I can pick up. I’d like to lay my hands on an antenna analyzer and ridiculously expensive coax.

Morse is coming along nicely. I realized today that I’d also have to test on numbers, punctuation, and some extra symbols, blah.

I think my partner bruised a rib or cracked my breastbone or something from practice the other day. I’ve got this spot on my chest, where if I press it or am leaned forward when breathing hard, it’s a dull uncomfortable pain.

The FCC issued my callsign today. I’m KE5KOA.

Yay! I passed my element 2 and element 3 amateur license tests! This will give me a Technician license whenever the FCC gets around to processing it over the next couple of weeks. When I solve Morse, I’ll be able to get my General license. They let me keep taking tests until I failed, so I took element 4 for the Extra Class. Some of it I knew, but the bulk was pure guesswork. I answered something like 27 out of 50 right, with 37 as passing. I would’ve been highly amused if I had accidentally passed it too.

I also ratted out my downstairs neighbors to apartment management for their yapping dogs. Happy day!

AMLI shafted me on my rent. Several weeks ago when I went in to ask about renewal I would swear the girl told me there was nothing to sign if I didn’t want to for renewal, it would keep on going. I told her to draw up whatever papers were necessary and I’d be in the next week to sign them. I never heard back so I thought it was a done deal. Yesterday I get the call saying my lease had reverted to month-to-month and I owed them an extra $150. I found out today they had already taken the money from my account, which makes it even less pointless to try fighting it. It’s annoying because even if I had tried, I’m positive they’d slide some fine print back over to me that protected them and my word was useless. Blah.