Prepairing for the inevitable...

The new antenna that is...

 

I decided yesterday that this antenna will need to go up quite a bit higher than the current vertical. It's about 1m above the guttering line, held up by a 2.4m galv pole (in concrete bucket, anchored to the wall), with a 1.8m galv pole attached to it holding it up. 

I've just ordered a 3.9m sign pole to attach to the existing 2.4m pole with the aim of putting the antenna up on that. 

I suspect I might need to up my anchoring game so I've got a pair of sign anchors that I'll use to bolt through the existing pole just to help get as much clamping action as possible. 

There's some logic in using the longer pole at the base and attaching to the top of that, but that creates some serviceability issues. Namely, I will struggle to get to the top of the higher pole to drop the lower down to get to the antenna.

In the current setup, I can literally loosen the extended pole and drop it down to ground level before I pull the clamps. A lot easier to bring down something that high and it's a lot easier to stand back up from the ground, attach and start the task of trying to get it up higher. One does need to consider that I have to do this myself, so the easier it is at ground level, the better. 

Sadly, I did just make a custom RG213 with crimped plugs that won't be long enough, but anyway, what's another $10? I just spent $120 on getting a pole too long to buy from Bunnings.. and too long for me to transport after all.

Apparently Gigaparts have shipped. The antenna that wasn't available on their site (when I checked, most of the interesting but affordable antennas were out of stock), was available on their eBay. Go figure.

In other news, the radio holder printed after a few days. It was somewhat of a failure. The layers near the top were weak as the filament seems to have clogged up a couple of times, but I managed to brute force it through before it was a complete write off. A lot of glue, an additional 3mm base plate and plate for the G90 shelf later, and it's solid enough to use. 

A little busy, and needs a hook for the Xiegu's mic, but mostly how it needs to be

Top down over the holder. You can see the fan sitting down over the Icom with its Jurassic Park fan cover. I printed an additional 140mm grate to cover the entire cavity.

I've started work on wall mounting my PC speakers - old Logitech Z-230s that I've been using for about 20 years. I found a wall mount for Z-530s on a 3D printing site, and they're the same (The 530 is a 5.1 channel set). They're constantly in the way at the moment so I'm looking forward to having them sit permanently out the way.

One is up. The other needs me to get the current radio PC off the wall. I'll do that once I've got USB passed through the wall. The connectors are coming from China, so it might take a while. HDMI is already in, and I'll make a space for the USB in the next day or so as I'm about to change my PC out as soon as the parts get here to finish it.

The G90 has moved under the shelf behind the switches. I received the XGGComms Digimode 4 for it the other day and there isn't enough distance between the two plugs for the radio end. For whatever reason, Xiegu decided to make the CAT control only occur from the socket on the face plate rather than the body. That makes life a little difficult if you want to keep the two too far apart (like I was). I need to do something about getting 12v down there for its fan...

Really.. I need to do something about 12v for that entire setup. I have a line coming from the fuse box down to a couple of 5 way clipped terminals that seem to be touchy. I need something a little more heavy duty and a little less flaky. Something that attaches to the rear of the shelf perhaps so I can keep all of the cabling short. 

Back to the Digimode-4 - looking at the waterfall, it's a lot cleaner than I was seeing using a USB audio interface. I was seeing an awful lot of lines 50Hz apart no matter how much I tried to shield it. Now, 40m is clean. 15m shows a few lines, but certainly nothing as nasty as it was. It is also a lot more convenient than having the CE19, the USB cat cable, CE19's ACC cable, custom audio cable and the USB audio interface, all with ferrites and what not. I suspect I could probably get a little more out of it once I clamp the excess up on the Digimode. Just waiting on my new ferrites....

Anyway, back to work..