One big scare when I was a teenager: My arm happened to be near the coax and I was blasting away at around a kilowatt on IIRC 20m. Suddenly the lower right arm experienced a sharp pain. When I touched it with my other hand it was at a high temperature ...
Yuck!
Not the kind of pipe I saw lately. Totally rusted and crudded. Galvanization after 50 years is usually ... gone.
However, we have a buried copper pipe going to a pool pump house and that is only 10ft from my coax feed-through into the house.
For 20m and up a ground plane is usually beneficial and given that there isn't space for a ton of radials this will never be symmetrical. So that has to go through the balun just to make sure the coax jacket doesn't become part of the antenna and pick up noise from the house.
On a sunny day (Wed, 21 Oct 2020 08:05:31 -0700) it happened Joerg wrote in :
My current place will be rebuild for 'gas free', the idea is that I will move house around the end of this year to a different castle just a few miles from here. That one has a very large garden, even wine grapes grow there, tasted them! Is being carpeted now for me. The idea came up to put a large dish for QO100 in the back of that garden so it can just beam over the house. But it involves also getting power there etc....
It covers Africa too. There is a lot of German chat on SSB on it, French, English, even Dutch.
OK, well why pay if you can get it for free.,,, I have a website and put everything I want to publish on it, is more expensive but gives full control, and no ads.
Yes, I keep my Ranger stuff for that.
Yes distances are much less here, next doctor is one street away,
In my school days I build a 250 W what was it 7 MHz linear as exam piece, school had a license. PE1-100 tube, man that was in the sixties!
Not much of a QSO maker, once it works I move to the next thing it seems. But yes I have build all that stuff. Also had some army stuff, 31 set... 40-48MHz, FM:
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As kid I bought that in the army surplus, got it working in one afternoon, called on some frequency got the army asking me who I was, switched it off :-) You do not mess with them :-)
In highschool I once build a spark transmitter.. not even tubes,,, RF is easy to make.
The big problem with the lower frequency bands the days is the interference from all the switchmode wallwarts etc etc..
On the 10 meter band it is already much better, worked South America S9 on that, all you need is a bit decent conditions, and then the GPA works very well. A wire dipole has directivity, different up-beam angle.
Of course. The main reason for running a long co-ax is to get the feed point away from the house.
And solar power inverters. A lot of installations here use the Israeli SolarEdge systems, which use a "power optimiser" aka DC-DC converter on every panel, with signalling superimposed on the DC feed. It means they can handle situations where some panels in a string get shaded, but they do make quite a bit of noise. I installed passive strings with a Fronius inverter (and extra ferrites on that) and using a 15cm sniffer loop, the spectrum analyser can't hear anything from more than 1m away.
The local ground isn't essential because there isn't much return current (c.f. the high feed impedance) and you can ground that inside the shack or elsewhere if you need to. It just means that your coax acts as a partial counterpoise and changes the tuned length.
Hydraulic rock splitters (inserted into core-drilled 50mm holes) and large diamond saws (like 1.5-2m diameter) are seeing a lot of use here in Sydney.
I bolted a pole through the metal roof onto the top of a wall and into the crossing point of two rafters. It was a rather painful job, but it supports a decent pole with the Ringo (2m/70cm) on top (and other antennas).
I drilled access holes 40cm from the top of the through pipe, stuffed wadding above that so I could seal it with silicone (leaving the top section for the Ringo to slide into) so the antenna cables come up inside the pole rather than through a separate roof penetration. The perforations are covered by a sliding PVC "umbrella" I made by shrinking a piece of PVC pipe onto the pole. You can shrink PVC to fit rightly using a hot air gun and hose clamps. Duct tape provides the final seal.
I picked up a used sailboat mast for a flagpole. I just need to set a base into the rock to support it. Some folk use fiberglass squid poles, which are telescopic and available above 10m. Perhaps not so long-lived but good for portable ops.
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