Good morning!!!!

[scott_vt]

Good Tractor Morning Steve,

BUT I do also have 2 of the LDG 600pro tuners and they are great as well

So I’m curious Steve. They claim that tuner will be able to tune multiple bands on my 80m dipole flattop up about 60 ft. Does this sound doable to you ? That 80m dipole runs basically north and south direction wise. So I get out quite well to my east into Europe and west. Just curious if you have any experience with that. I am also blessed to be on a hill with an elevation of about 560 ft above sea level. Thanks for your thoughts

 

[wngsprd]

35 going to 62. Rain late.

Yep, Scotty, Della took me to the mountains, as a back seat driver. Cool that you heading back to the Caribbean soon...or should I say, hot?

30 outside right now, may hit 60 today. No precipitation. Yesterday was a super nice day for this time of year. Basically sat outside all day and chatted with friends.

It is nice that a warm spell will bring so many folks outside.

Wednesday, we took down all of our Christmas decorations and packed them away. My wife was so happy that we got it done in one day...at least 95% done. Both inside and out...but we were bushed by the end of the day. Once we take off the tree ornaments and lights, I lop the branches off the tree and pass them out the window onto the tarp I placed. This avoids dropping needles through the house. Then off to one of my wildlife brush piles.

When we finished, there was an hour of daylight, and the temps were in the 60s, so I decided to wash my wife's terribly dirty Highlander. Sunset caught me cleaning up.

 

[wngsprd]

I still have 133 miles to go to complete the SNP 500 (actually 514 miles). I've hiked many of those 133 miles, but not able to count them, by the "rules." Plus some of them are on unmaintained trails that need to be hiked in winter...so am going after them now.

Here are my 2 favorite pix from yesterday...one lone icicle trying to hang on in the 50 degree heat wave, and Della grabbing a drink.

Plus one that shows where we hiked, from a distance.

 

[ArlyA]

I still have 133 miles to go to complete the SNP 500 (actually 514 miles). I've hiked many of those 133 miles, but not able to count them, by the "rules." Plus some of them are on unmaintained trails that need to be hiked in winter...so am going after them now.

Here are my 2 favorite pix from yesterday...one lone icicle trying to hang on in the 50 degree heat wave, and Della grabbing a drink.

Plus one that shows where we hiked, from a distance.View attachment 4744230View attachment 4744231View attachment 4744232

Like you, we are hikers.

 

[daugen]

good morning all
going to be warmer today, but cloudy with rain coming in.
flooring guy coming this morning to measure house for replacement vinyl flooring.
then this afternoon my friend with his new dumpster business is coming with a half full dumpster from
another job and will take the broken hot tub and that rv sofa out of my basement and haul them away.
A big to do finally scratched off the list.

Now I can organize basement a little better though it's not very pleasant down there, despite my having it freshly painted.
reminds me I need to run the oxygen generator, helps to eliminate that moldy smell, despite humidifiers running constantly.
It also seems to drive the spiders out. I guess they don't like a big dose of oxidizer to breath.

 

[Buppies]

39 high in low 60s rain coming I hope was 2inches now lucky if 1/2 in

Help not showing up on time leaving early hard for me to do my job even get to PO. Woke up an hour ago too early went to bed after game. Ole Miss.played a good game

Nose is running hope of getting sick

Prayers for all our Country

 

[riptides]

38 outside this AM, heading to upper 50's, rain expected later today.

Busier day than usual yesterday. Real job stupid stuff ruled the day with interrupts. Managed to get the grocery run in. Ended up on the roof getting the Christmas lights down. Don't know what was up with the balance issue though. Every time I looked up at the hook holding the lights I felt dizzy. Snagged them down on the third attempt. I have a pole saw modified to hook and unhook them. Saves another twenty feet of stress.

Not my dog got the last of the stiches out of her paw. Unfortunate she still sports the cone of shame. Her whole personality changes with that thing, she just sulks around. I'll need to look into paw boots before we go on any more hikes. It was a costly accident.

The wife and I ended the day with our own property hike. A good three miles looking for the game cams. LOL. I missed one, took the wrong trail. That will be the agenda item today before the rain.

Hope all have a great day today. TGIF, be safe.

 

[B7510HSD]

Good Tractor Morning Steve,

So I’m curious Steve. They claim that tuner will be able to tune multiple bands on my 80m dipole flattop up about 60 ft. Does this sound doable to you ? That 80m dipole runs basically north and south direction wise. So I get out quite well to my east into Europe and west. Just curious if you have any experience with that. I am also blessed to be on a hill with an elevation of about 560 ft above sea level. Thanks for your thoughts

Scott yes it should no problem! You radio internal tuner will tune about a 3:1 SWR range and the external tuner will tune about a 10:1 SWR range so you will turn the internall tuner off and just use the external tuner. I use all external tuners. My Delta Loop antenna will tune any frequency I throw at it. My new antenna just landed yesterday a Cushcraft R9 vertical. Going to give it a try! I'm not a vertical fan but the price was to good to not try it.

 

[Happy in NC]

Good morning TBN!!
48 this morning. Should be about 68 this afternoon under cloudy sky. Rain moving in for tomorrow all day.

Got the compressor all mounted and ready for the belt. Got the motor pulley in and checked to make sure it will fit. Came late so I will get it mounted correctly and check for belt size first thing this morning and head to Lowes to pick one up. Long belt. Over 5' so I'll need to get a mower belt. Hopefully a test run this afternoon before I get it back to it's shelter.
That's my agenda for the day.

Time for a second cup
Everyone have a great and safe day!!

 

[ronjhall]

Now I can organize basement a little better though it's not very pleasant down there, despite my having it freshly painted.
reminds me I need to run the oxygen generator, helps to eliminate that moldy smell, despite humidifiers running constantly.
It also seems to drive the spiders out. I guess they don't like a big dose of oxidizer to breath.

Hope you ment Dehumidifier in basement. To me, humidifier would help make mold.

 

[WinterDeere]

Scott yes it should no problem! You radio internal tuner will tune about a 3:1 SWR range and the external tuner will tune about a 10:1 SWR range so you will turn the internall tuner off and just use the external tuner. I use all external tuners. My Delta Loop antenna will tune any frequency I throw at it. My new antenna just landed yesterday a Cushcraft R9 vertical. Going to give it a try! I'm not a vertical fan but the price was to good to not try it.

I design SWR tuners for a living, in fact I own a business that builds them for very large industrial applications, 100 kW stuff at 0.3 meters or 10’s of kilowatts up to millimeter frequencies. But I know absolutely nothing about what a ham hobbyist would use for a home setup. Are these automatic tuners, or manually adjusted? If automatic, it seems the time constants of the control loops of two tuners might fight against one another, causing tuning oscillations.

Also, are your antennas really ever actually worse than 3:1? I’m assuming a manufacturer would never ship one that far out of tune, so this must be due to reflections from adjacent structures, etc?

We are usually aiming for 1.22:1 or better on broadband tunes, or better than 1.06:1 on narrowband tunes. Reflected power becomes a major thermal challenge for your transmitter, when pushing 10’s of kilowatts, and the efficiency penalty of higher VSWRs can be a problem for power supply in many applications.

 

[daugen]

Hope you ment Dehumidifier in basement. To me, humidifier would help make mold.

yes, sure did, thanks
keeps it around 50%
mold is bad news
have to be careful using the ozone generator, lots of materials not happy with
it. But nothing nice in basement now, everything boxed.
I need to tuck in the protective tents over some racks of old stored clothes, suits, stuff
I am way overdue giving away.
maybe soon.

I sure don't need all those suits.
problem is, who does anymore?
unless you have an office in the big city, don't think suits are going thing anymore.
my suit is now a double kneed pair of blue jeans perfect for gardening.

 

[B7510HSD]

I design SWR tuners for a living, in fact I own a business that builds them for very large industrial applications, 100 kW stuff at 0.3 meters or 10’s of kilowatts up to millimeter frequencies. But I know absolutely nothing about what a ham hobbyist would use for a home setup. Are these automatic tuners, or manually adjusted? If automatic, it seems the time constants of the control loops of two tuners might fight against one another, causing tuning oscillations.

Also, are your antennas really ever actually worse than 3:1? I’m assuming a manufacturer would never ship one that far out of tune, so this must be due to reflections from adjacent structures, etc?

We are usually aiming for 1.22:1 or better on broadband tunes, or better than 1.06:1 on narrowband tunes. Reflected power becomes a major thermal challenge for your transmitter, when pushing 10’s of kilowatts, and the efficiency penalty of higher VSWRs can be a problem for power supply in many applications.

These are Auto tuners and you would not use the tuner in the radio if you add an external tuner. Depending on Frequency yes your SWR could be worse than 3:1 . When you operate between 1.9MHz - 30MHz with a single antenna it could be much higher.Is this efficient no but with the tuner it is usable. Only other option would be to install a tuned antenna for each Band you wanted to operate on. My antenna's are nothing more than 12ga. wire being fed with a 4:1 balun and coax. my Delta Loop antenna is 380ft long. I have a total of 3 wire antennas in the air.

 

[Bronco82]

Morning folks. My driveway base for snowblowing has turned to three inches of slush. Cringed while driving the whole way down it. Warm day with rain instead of snow here. The snow should return tomorrow though.

 

[kenmbz]

Morning all, 27 going to 56 and partly cloudy.
More lab work today.
More changes at work, what fun.

Christmas tree is now out in back yard waiting to move to pile.

Be well,

 

[WinterDeere]

These are Auto tuners and you would not use the tuner in the radio if you add an external tuner.

Depending on Frequency yes your SWR could be worse than 3:1 . When you operate between 1.9MHz - 30MHz with a single antenna it could be much higher.

That makes sense. Way down there in the HF bands, "near field" is huge, at wavelengths up to 517 feet! Putting any big metal object (another building, towers, other antennas) within 1 - 3 wavelengths of your antenna can really cause VSWR to spike up, especially if the distance to obstacle happens to be some quarter-wave multiple of the wavelength.

Most of my matching network design is in GHz, but I do have a few that run as low as 50 or even 30 MHz. We are operating over similar 20:1 bandwidths, in many cases, which makes for some big tuning networks. But back when I was doing transmitter design, I had projects ranging 9 kHz - 18 GHz, in 4 very broad bands.

I have a total of 3 wire antennas in the air.

You'd like some of my customer's sites. The one at Boscombe Downs has a 330 foot tall log periodic antenna illuminating a test site the size of several football fields, at 30,000 watts transmit power from 9 kHz to 250 MHz on a single broadband transmitter. Another at White Sands Missile range has horns you could park a car inside of, and several 30 - 100 kW CW transmitters, each just a decade wide (e.g. 3 - 30 MHz + 30 - 100 MHz) alongside sites with multiple-megawatt narrowband pulsed transmitters. This is all for directed energy weapons research and EMC hardening of military equipment for threats varying from nuclear blasts to solar radiation.

 

[Popgadget]

Good Morning
39° and climbing, supposed to be over 50 by the time the rain starts tonight.

Yesterday wasn’t a bad day around here. Groomer came and spent some quality time with Zoe, she really needed it. I bet that she filled a large trash bag with hair. So now she is bathed brushed out, nails trimmed and worn out. The groomer comes here and uses the walk in shower, so it’s not such a traumatic event, but Zoe will be Leary of the bathroom for a while.

I did some puttering in the shop, my new welder has an 240 outlet to power a water cooler, but my cooler is 120v. I found a transformer upstairs when I was cleaning up, so I added an IEC inlet to it to connect and now my water cooler is switched by the welder.

I decided to make a research project out of the circulator that I dropped and broke. Bead blasted it, clamped it together, v’d out the crack with a carbide burr on a die grinder, pre heated it with a mapp torch and then TIG brazed it with silicon bronze rod. It was my first attempt at that process. Normally I would have used a torch and flux coated rod.
E

I reassembled the pump, but still have to make flanges to pressure test it.

Today I’m gonna go to Costco with my mechanical contractor buddy, conveniently it’s just across the street from Mission BBQ. Even more convenient is that I have a gift certificate for Mission BBQ given to me by someone that I made something for. It was literally getting paid to play (or learn in this case, as it involved 3D modeling and printing).

Not sure what is up after that, but I’m going to see Dale Watson tonight at the Sellersville Theater, a local small, but excellent venue. So while there will be music tonight, I’ll be a spectator, not a participant.

 

[FriendwithTractor]

Good Morning to All Who Celebrate! Currently 45° heading to a high of 50° with cloud and rain forecast for this afternoon.

Not much on the agenda this week, Work has been pretty busy. Lots of new projects and belt tightening. Tonight after work my girlfriend and I have a call with an immigration agency to officially start the process to bring her here. Realtor reached out to me today with a couple houses, hopefully next week/weekend I'll be able to get away from work long enough to go look at them. Thinking some of them aren't too bad, but buying sight unseen is always a terrible idea.

Otherwise, just the usual January going on. Need to schedule my trip to PH in the end of April and get that booked, then it's just a house hunt that will occupy most of my time and GF's immigration process. Not a lot of tractoring happening, but if the skies clear for long enough, another box burning session could also be scheduled.

Had to laugh at the acorns stashed in the rotor. Some squirrel is pacing around going "I know I left them Right Here!"

Here's hoping the rest of the winter isn't as mild, otherwise I'll feel like a fool for buying the snowblower!
Y'all stay safe out there and be well! Enjoy the thaw while it lasts!
Praying for all Ailing and Recovering!

 

[buckeyefarmer]

had already rained when I got up, so that changes today's plans somewhat. more rain coming after noon.
Did clean up more of the unfinished room last night before bedtime, got the new shelving almost full already, but now won't have to crawl into crawl space for a lot of it.
Still issues with contacting wife's retirement. They just won't answer their phone, goes straight to a message saying to log in online, which is the problem, she can't log in. Attempts to fix online just generates an email response that says to call the number they won't answer, so around and around the merry go round we go... finally found a place to submit a trouble ticket, even that was a hassle, but think it finally got sent. Maybe we will hear from that. Last resort is contact them via US mail.

 

[m7040]

good morning, 42 with high of 55 cloudy conditions with rain possible later on

Took to truck out of the barn to give it some exercise. Had not used in a while so have to be carefull with the gas because it so much more powerful. Don't want to spin tires

Made a run to PO to ship package and picked up 3 pairs of compression socks for wife. Set us back 120 dollars but they help her swelling a lot

Some drama with parents payment for GD at college. Seems they have other priorities. More to come on that