Progress

 

Yep, I definitely suck at blogs.

Finally a couple of weeks ago I found out that I had passed my Foundation exam. I finally received my certificate of proficiency yesterday.

I still don’t yet have a license. The ACMA is taking their time in issuing the invoice. Just to clarify, I sat my exam late August. I found out I passed early October, and I’m still waiting. On a process that in the US that takes hours, not months.

I can’t even recall what has changed since then.

My vertical is up, and has some add ons. The FT8 traffic it can see is very much global. It’s still bloody noisy on 80m when trying to listen into nets.

Infamous radial free vertical. Receives FT8 pretty well.

 

I built a 5 band inverted L, which took a few revisions. I was able to get it to be fairly resonant at 40 & 80m. It had a ugly balun at the base in attempt to avoid the RG58 becoming an antenna. I ran the RG58 through the house into the shack, then realised that not only was I no longer resonant, I couldn’t even find where it was now resonant at.

A bit of measuring indicates I’m probably about 4m short.. 2m each side of the trap at the end of 40m. I’ll need to rig up something better than the “ugly balun”, then extend. I can move the far end post easily enough anyway.

As it is, the L is a lot quieter than the vertical, but I still can’t hear a lot on the local net. My next task will be to jack the far end up further. At the moment it’s sitting at a height of about 4m. I need to find a low drag, lightweight, but permanent solution that can get perhaps another 2m on that. That should be enough to get it up over the roof line between the houses.

If I can get some height out of it and bring it back as far as I can, I should hopefully be able to deal with the extra 4m I need to add to it. I could probably do with an antenna analyser as well, but my budget lives in non-existent territory now.

In other radio news, the antenna in my car does bizarre things on a local VHF repeater frequency. I keep getting break through from another frequency on another band.