New antenna project & visiting radio rally

 Had some days off the job. Finally started the new antenna project. Have written about that before. It is a square halo design which I saw on the PA9X site at first. I will first try with a 20m halo only, Just to see if it meets my expectations. More pictures will follow when progress is made.

If all goes well I will try to make it a multiband halo. The difference with the antenna PA9X made is that I use a fiberglass "boom" to hold the balun box.

It has been a while ago. The covid-19 pandemic....well all is slowly returning to normal. There finally was a radio rally I like to go to. I went to Beetsterzwaag village together with a new colleague which also is a newly licensed ham PD8HW. It's fun to have another radio hobbyist at the job. I have to say it was fun. We met a lot of people and of course we bought some (old) equipment.

Some fun things we saw...

I had to look for a variable coil of some sort just because of the value in money. Not that I found it. But I found some variable coils and this one looks like it is completely home made. The value was 15 euro (about 16 USD) which is cheap I think. Imagine the effort someone made to fabricate this. I did not buy it. I bought a large variable capacitor to use at some future antenna project. I might buy a nice variable coil someday.

Some capacitors I saw when wandering around. Better be careful with charged ones. 18000uF is quite a large capacity.

This is an item I have a question about. Anyone that can tell me how this works? At first I though it would receive beacon signals and display it with LEDs blinking. But there is no receiver or receiver connection. Only a power supply input. I think it is a clock of something showing when a particular beacon is on air? And how is the time sync working? It might not be so difficult of course...

It is probabely pre-computer. There are far more sophisticated systems these days...however it is intriguing.