One nice spring day in 2019, my grandson and I went outside for a walk around the property. I happened to notice a piece of aluminum tubing I had lying beside a shed. On further investigation I realized it was half of a 20m beam element that another ham had left behind after a field day. It had been a half wave dipole for the event and he told me to just keep it. I asked my grandson, 6yr old at the time if I remember correctly, if he would like to help me build an antenna. His reply was a curious, "What's an antenna papa?". So, we had the unforgettable experience of building a ground mounted 1/4 wave 20m vertical together. A few days ago I got the idea to add more bands to this antenna. I did some digging around and found some wire, purchased a few pvc fittings and hose clamps, and started putting additional 1/4 wave elements for 17m, 15m, 12m, and 10m. I know, some of those bands are going to be very inefficient ground mounted, but what the heck, it's amatuer
I thought I would share a little project that I was just involved with. I have several photos of the progression of moving a broadcast station from the basement of an aging house into a new building on the same site. The old house that used to house the studios and transmitters was getting in bad shape and the station owners decided it was time to make a move into a new building. We had to dismantle the station from its 15+yr home and extricate it from the basement. This is the BE FM 2C backup transmitter. I didn't get a photo of the FM 4C coming out. Below is the old "ice bridge ", if it can be called that, that carried the cables to the tower. You can see the new building and icebridge in the background. The antenna switch. Have you ever bolted the flanges of your feed lines together? That is rigid 50 ohm line from the transmitter to the switch. The 90 degree fitting going on the switch. The gray box behind the switch is the 3kw oil filled dummy load. W
The dual bander in my truck started to make some racket from the fan and I was told I had noise on TX. So, I figured it was the fan going out as it had audible noise to indicate that. It turned out the noise on TX was another issue, the infamous Kenwood audio tick, a new mic cord fixes that. I did a quick look around the web and found a nice fan from Noctua. Noctua is known for high end, silent fans for computers and other applications. Sure enough they have one that is a near direct replacement for the fan on the V71. The is the Noctua NF-A4x10 FLX. ~$14 as of this writing. This fan does have to have the leads cut and soldered to the connector from the original fan. That is a simple operation for anyone who has basic soldering skills. And if you don't, maybe you could practice a bit and tackle this project. Just leave enough "tail" on everything you cut so that you can cut again and re-solder if necessary. Remove the cover from the radio being careful to use
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