Earlier this afternoon, I looked out my office window and noticed that something didn’t look quite right. For one thing, there was an odd shadow on the office window. So, I put on some shoes and went out to investigate.

What I found was that my cobra antenna had come down. Further investigation showed that the problem was with the end insulator. After being up in the air for nearly nine years, it just gave out. I’d say that nine years is decent service life for an insulator made from a Dollar Store cutting board.

As a temporary fix, I think that I’m going to stick the support rope through the hole at the bottom of the photo and get it back up in the air while I ponder how to replace it. Any ideas for the type of material that I should use?

Rain puts a damper (literally!) on 30m operations

I love my homebrew Cobra antenna…

…but it suffers from one big drawback. When it rains, the ladder line impedance changes and I have to retune the antenna. And, when it rains constantly for more than a couple of hours—like it has been here for the past 24 hours or so—I can’t tune it at all on 30 meters. That’s a bummer because 30 meters is my favorite band.

Oh well….It looks like the rain has finally let up here, so I should be back in business on 30 meters this evening.

POTA Ragchewing?

One of my ragchewing buddies is Howard, K4LXY. He’s fun to chat with because he always has something interesting that he’s doing or working on. A couple of days ago during our QSO, he suggested that POTA would be even more fun if somehow one could get credit for ragchewing from a park.

I like this idea. Perhaps if one had a ragchew of 15 minutes or more from a park, that one contact would qualify the operation as a legal activation and 10 contacts. What do you think?

More breaking, less IDing

It used to be that, at the end of a transmission, one would send the other station’s call, then “DE”, then your call, then “K”. So, for example, if I was working W1ABC, I’d send “W1ABC DE KB6NU K”.

Lately, however, I’ve been noticing more stations simply sending “BK” when they’re done with their transmission. I’m cool with this. The regulations say that one only has to identify every ten minutes, so why waste time sending call signs over and over? What do you think?