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Saturday, May 28, 2022

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.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Bas,

    had no time this year, but Beetsterzwaag is one of the rally's I like most.

    The MFJ Beacon monitor has a DCF clock inside and indeed leds go on when a certain beacon should be hearable.
    They can still be bought, Classic International has them on their website.

    73, Kees PC1I

    ReplyDelete
  2. Tnx for the answer Kees. Didn't know there was actually a DCF receiving clock inside. Interesting though. Didn't ask what his selling price was. 73, Bas

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Thanks for your comment. Bedankt voor je reactie. 73, Bas