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| 2011 was the year to dust off my trusty Yaesu, connect a simple wire antenna and have a listen... |
As of April 2011 conditions on the 11 meter band here in the UK have been pretty much non-existent, not disheartened by this, I look forward with great anticipation the coming months and years to favourable DX conditions. All that remains to be done is to sort out a radio 'hut' and erect my unused Solarcon IMAX 2000. I hope through this blog to keep you up todate on my adventures during Solar cycle 24! For now I will have to be content with some SWL.
4 comments:
As I recall the last time we fired up that Yaesu, we only picked up one station, and that was very faint, So I'm looking forward to improvements on that with this propagation. It's all looking good for some nice radio time. The charts look a darn site better than they have a in a very long time. Does this mean that we're going to be building a "radio shack" at the bottom of your garden, or are we going to stay in the warmth and relative cumfort of your loft space? And which one of us is going to be sticking that Solarcon up on roof!
To be honest, the wire in the house I was using for SWL was picking up S5+ of noise and offered poor reception, on the external antenna it is S0 to S1 of noise durring the quiet times which is much better
The idea with the 'radio shack' was to reduce the lengh of coax (and cost), but in winter it's going to be very cold out there, so my current plan is to have the radio in the house (probably actic room) and mount the antenna at ~30 meter height on top of the popular tree in the garden to try and make up for some of the loss in the long coax run (which is estimated to be about 75-80% power loss) The fun bit is getting up the tree, lop the very top off and mount the antenna, I did think about using climbing gear, but on second thoughts given the type of tree, a few ladders 'Fred Dibnah' style would probably be better.
Reminding me of our climbing gear dry run in the trees down the forest a while back!
That's some distance from that tree to your loft space. Thinking the weight of the coax alone is going to need to strung along a support cable!. Seems like a lot of loss to me. Wondering why not up on the roof!?.....is the idea of the tree to help it blend in and be less obvious?
It all about height, been low down in a valley I would like as much height as I can get for a good view of the horizon. Did a rough height measurment of the tree and it's more like 40 meter to the top, thats about 4 times higher than the house!
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