Any Ham Radio Guys Here?

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Hi Joe, good to see you are still having fun. HRO,AES all stores like a speed shop, you love going but hate how broke you are when you get there.AES is about 25 miles from me and I try to never go because of that. My CFO (wife) has enough trouble with the cars without me going there.I just went back to work a couple of days a week to buy the stuff I need to fix all the broken antennas and tower issues.Good luck with the 2m beam and post some pictures. '73 Bruce
 
BARNEY'S CAR said:
Hi Joe, good to see you are still having fun. HRO,AES all stores like a speed shop, you love going but hate how broke you are when you get there.AES is about 25 miles from me and I try to never go because of that. My CFO (wife) has enough trouble with the cars without me going there.I just went back to work a couple of days a week to buy the stuff I need to fix all the broken antennas and tower issues.Good luck with the 2m beam and post some pictures. '73 Bruce
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AES Rocks! I hear ya about the CFO.... :toothy5:

I had to make a few mods to the outdoor box to accept everything and it's about packed. I should've bought a bigger box, lol.
 

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Crap, trying to get the pics off my phone of my buds helping me out. Working on it...
 
Joe you will quickly learn this is just like cars. Always figure on going bigger right away.When you upgrade you will want some type of HF ant. and at that point you will have out grown the box,so when you do the next box just double what you think you need because you will grow into that pretty quick.When winter comes and you play radio instead of cars you will come up with lots of low buck ideas to do the next spring and your needs will grow again. That's pretty much what happens in this hobby. Keep working on that general lic.......Good Luck. OH the antennas look good,have fun
 
BARNEY'S CAR said:
Joe you will quickly learn this is just like cars. Always figure on going bigger right away.When you upgrade you will want some type of HF ant. and at that point you will have out grown the box,so when you do the next box just double what you think you need because you will grow into that pretty quick.When winter comes and you play radio instead of cars you will come up with lots of low buck ideas to do the next spring and your needs will grow again. That's pretty much what happens in this hobby. Keep working on that general lic.......Good Luck. OH the antennas look good,have fun
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Thanks! Your statement is 100% correct. Man this hobby can get pricey fast. It doesn't really have to be but just like cars, there's always another mod to get farther.

mullinax95 said:
Man what a lighting rod! lol
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LMAO! Thank Goodness it's fiberglass. Still wouldn't save me from a direct strike but Holy Smokes that vertical gets out!
 
I have my antenna grounded but I don't see how it would survive a direct hit like you say. My neighbor got a direct hit on his house and it blew the chimney apart. Chunks of brick and mortar flew about 50 feet. He doesn't even have a antenna or satellite dish. I can't get in my mind what the lighten was attracted too. I guess it doesn't have to metal.
 
mullinax95 said:
I have my antenna grounded but I don't see how it would survive a direct hit like you say. My neighbor got a direct hit on his house and it blew the chimney apart. Chunks of brick and mortar flew about 50 feet. He doesn't even have a antenna or satellite dish. I can't get in my mind what the lighten was attracted too. I guess it doesn't have to metal.
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Nothing will survive a direct strike for the most part including the big commercial radio towers. Even they'll get damaged pretty bad. I never liked lightning but this new hobby really has me freaked about it. :-|

Yeah, lightning is weird in that respect, trees get hit daily and they're wood for pete's sake.
 
mullinax95 said:
I have my antenna grounded but I don't see how it would survive a direct hit.
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It won't. Part of the reason that mountaintop systems survive so well is several fold.

First, the fact that a high, grounded "unit" of the tower, feedlines, antennas, and in some cases a big metal "brush" on top actually helps to bleed off would be strikes so they cannot form.

But if a big tower DOES get struck, "everything is bonded to everything." Feedlines are bonded to the tower every so often up and down the tower. Just about ALL commercial antennas are a "grounded" design, that is, you'll never see an "open" (DC open) quarter wave whip on a decent commercial site. Of course Polyphasor or other surge arrestors are used at the bottom.

Extensive grounding "halos" are installed. Normally a ground ring of many ground rods is installed around the tower---I'm not talking about ground radials on a AM broadcast tower, but rather something like a moutain top VHF/ UHF site. Grounds are intentionally "rounded" around corners rather than nice neat 90* bends. All internal buiding racks, cabinets, AC/ ventilation gear, door and window frames, etc, is all bonded to an internal building circular halo, which is bonded to the tower ground.

All this helps to make a unitized, "spread" ground shall we say "object" that tends to act like a large gauge wire, helping to "unconcentrate" the hit, so to speak.

Your fiberglass monopole IS subject to explosion with a hit, as are commercial glass monopoles. Why some of them survive as well as they do is actually beyond me.

THE BIG THING with grounding is to try to help the strike/ bleed off go to ground BEFORE much of it gets "into the house."

This is why stuff like coax-fed dipoles and other ungrounded (not DC ground) antennas can be so very dangerous. A Polyphasor is not much protection on one of these.

Somewhere Motorola used to put out a booklet on site grounding practices. If you look around, I'm sure you can find it for download, or contact your local two-way shop.
 
I have 4 vertical antenna's and a G5RV and never got hit by lighting in the 30 years of doing ham radio and CB Radio.. I always like going to breakfast with other hams..You can learn alot listening to the old timers talking..
 
OneBadDart said:
I have 4 vertical antenna's and a G5RV and never got hit by lighting in the 30 years of doing ham radio and CB Radio.. I always like going to breakfast with other hams..You can learn alot listening to the old timers talking..
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All it takes is once, my friend. I live in a neighborhood that is sort of "low lying" with many many trees at a higher level than my antennas. A friend of mine lives up on a "little ridge" on the NW end of Spokane, and his tower has been hit twice. Last time blew the snot out of a Comet?? monopole
 
I'm waiting for it.. I know its gonna come one day.. Thats why when it storms I unhook all the coax from the radio's...
 
67Dart273 said:
All it takes is once, my friend. I live in a neighborhood that is sort of "low lying" with many many trees at a higher level than my antennas. A friend of mine lives up on a "little ridge" on the NW end of Spokane, and his tower has been hit twice. Last time blew the snot out of a Comet?? monopole
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OneBadDart said:
I'm waiting for it.. I know its gonna come one day.. Thats why when it storms I unhook all the coax from the radio's...
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I'm just a piglet compared to you experinced hams but this stuff is way too expensive to leave hooked up. When I leave or when weather looks threatening, all my stuff gets unhooked and goes inside in a desk drawer and the antenna switch goes to the grounded position.

On another note, it seems that even 2m is affected by weather. A few days ago I got all over, today, not so much. Soil moisture has dropped, could that be it? I also noticed that my horizontal beam now has an effect (as a ground plane? My ant switch grounds all unused positions) of about .5 S meter depending on it's pointed direction on recieved signals. Odd.

Another thing, I noticed noise has jumped since evening has arrived. It's normally about S2 during the day with the pre-amp on and is now about S4. Weird....
 
The distance you can talk is affected by weather and solar flares. I never used a beam antenna for anything or a switch sorry I can't help you with that...
 
Thunderstorms can ionize the air-meteors can to. And the solar cycle. You can get skip on two meters, just not as often.
 
Looking great Joe! And yes even 2 is affected by weather. Some days are great and you may catch an opening and talk several hundred miles then the next day it closes and you can barely talk 50 miles. We had a nice opening a few yrs. ago and I talked to a guy in southern Alabama on 432 with just 40 watts, 30 over 9 both ways. That was quite a surprise. Here's a link to Hepburn's tropo forecast page that you can watch to try to catch some openings

http://www.dxinfocentre.com/tropo_enp.html
 
OneBadDart said:
The distance you can talk is affected by weather and solar flares. I never used a beam antenna for anything or a switch sorry I can't help you with that...
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Roger that. Yep, sporadic E layer is cool but haven't been able to play with that yet.

slant6/4speed said:
Thunderstorms can ionize the air-meteors can to. And the solar cycle. You can get skip on two meters, just not as often.
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And roger that as well. Odd that I might consider in and out of Boulder a skip but what the heck do I know, could very well be true since Boulder is in a valley surrounded by a ridge on one side and mountains on two. Troposheric tunneling maybe? :sign6:
 
fishy68 said:
Looking great Joe! And yes even 2 is affected by weather. Some days are great and you may catch an opening and talk several hundred miles then the next day it closes and you can barely talk 50 miles. We had a nice opening a few yrs. ago and I talked to a guy in southern Alabama on 432 with just 40 watts, 30 over 9 both ways. That was quite a surprise. Here's a link to Hepburn's tropo forecast page that you can watch to try to catch some openings

http://www.dxinfocentre.com/tropo_enp.html
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Thanks Fishy! We have such odd terrain here that Boulder seems way out of "Line of Sight" that one gentleman is sending me a QSL! It seems almost NVIS if that makes sense to you. :smile:

Edit: Just for fun I'm going to hit 144.200 on USB with the horizontal....
 
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