[karc] Expedient antenna build!
- From: Larissa Reise <ve3kgc@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "karc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <karc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 13 May 2014 20:49:56 -0400
Hi all,
Glad I was able to participate in tonight's net all the way from wet and
cold Petawawa! I've uploaded two of the better pictures of my antenna to my
Google Plus wall, and set the privacy to Public. Hopefully that should
allow everyone access to see them.
If I'm doing this right, the link should be:
https://plus.google.com/+LarissaReise
Anyway, it's a full wave dipole made of metal industrial pallet strapping I
stole from the garbage can, paracord (technically all-cotton "550" cord)
and blue duct tape. Because that's what I had on hand. The coax is
commercially-produced and terminates in ring connectors - handy! All I
travelled with was the coax, my Baofeng and a specialized Baofeng adapter
(female mini-SMA to SO-259)
Apparently my signal into the repeater was a bit better with this antenna
than last week with the rubber ducky. It was strong enough that I had no
problem using my iPhone and IRLP-Me's DTMF dialler to get into our
repeater! (First try! Assaf will recall the struggles I had last week...)
I was following along the net until 1955 when the IRLP timeout kicked me
(because I hadn't keyed up in 20min or so) and was unable to rejoin because
"the destination node is in use locally."
Overall I'm super pleased with this experiment. It took me just over 20 min
to build from scratch - I borrowed a ruler (of course I hadn't even brought
a tape measure...) and got someone with tin snips to cut the metal
strapping where I marked it (because I also forgot to bring my wire
stripper/cutters). I used a partly filled Gatorade bottle to heave the
works into a tree. The extra piece of paracord, coming off the top of the
antenna at an angle and attached to the coax, was just there to try to keep
the feedline coming off at a 90° angle or close to it, which it did. The
whole affair was light enough that once heaved into a tree, I didn't even
need to secure the heaving line - it just stayed nicely in place.
73 de VE3KGC!
--
Sent from my iPhone
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