The nominating committee put forth their selections for the club officers at the June meeting, and at the last meeting this past Monday, people at the meeting voted for them. Since nobody else stepped forward to throw their hat into the ring, the officers selected by the nominating committee were all elected by acclamation. Of the officer positions, the only new person was the President (me).
I’ll start my new job with the August meeting. It’s a bit of a higher profile position than I’m used to taking, but I’m looking forward to serving the club as President as the club heads towards its 50th anniversary in a few years.
Spent the afternoon today getting the coax from the entrance panel through the conduit and into the shack. On the first attempt the string I was pulling the coax with broke, so we had to pull some more string. One of the contractors that worked on the house told us a while back that if the string ever broke, tie a new string to a plastic grocery bag, stuff it into the conduit and use a vacuum at the other end to suck it through. Worked like a charm.
With the new string run, managed to get both of the lengths of coax (RG-8X I believe) I had used at the old house through the conduit. One is 75′ and the other is 100′ along with a few extra strings in case we want to pull some more coax. Based on what was left of the 75′ coax hanging outside the entrance panel, it looks like the run between the panel and the shack is around 60-65′. That means there’s a good bit of coax coiled up in the entrance panel right now.
Entrance panel coax
Still a fair bit to do at the entrance panel. I have to decide if I want to trim it (which would mean I’d have to learn how to terminate coax) or leave it coiled up inside the box. Lightning arrestor needs to be mounted, and I’ll have to work out a grounding scheme. Then I need to figure out how to hold the antenna up in the air.
At the shack end, there’s enough sticking out that should make it easy to work with.
Coax in the shack
I think I’m going to drill a couple of holes in the wall plate for some short SO-239 bulkhead connectors. Then it will be short jumper cables from the radio to the wall.
One step closer to getting the shack back on the air.
I made it into another issue of QST! In the Dec 2016 issue among the 2016 Field Day results there’s a picture of me taken by Tom/AJ4UQ of me operating at the WA4USN digital station.
Me operating as WA4USN for 2016 Field Day
It’s small and pretty indistinct, but yep, that’s me.
Today is my fourth year of being a licensed amateur radio guy. It’s been a lot of fun so far even though I haven’t been on the radio a whole lot recently.
Now going into my fifth year, we’re about to move into a new house with a few additions geared toward amateur radio. Looking forward to being able to get back on the air, and hopefully spend some more time playing radio. I have a lot of radio and electronics related projects to work on. It will take some time to get the shack and workbench set up and organized, but it will be nice to have a space to work in again.
The only thing missing is a convenient way to get an antenna a good height into the air. The trees next to the old house were a great place to hide an antenna in, but no such features at the new house. I’ll have to work on something else to get the antenna(s) up in the air.
Following in the footsteps of my regular blog to WordPress, I’ve done the same with this one.
Rather than just starting fresh, I also migrated the posts (but not the comments…too difficult) from the previous incarnation to this one so that everything is all in the same place.
Not sure if everything still works yet, but I’ll probably find out eventually
