…and how they present challenges to restful sleep. While we’re at it, I’ll talk about an iOS App that I think should exist, but I have not yet found.

My wife and I both snore. In my case, it’s severe Sleep Apnea for which I wear a CPAP, but that doesn’t guarantee that I’m 100% snore-free. I can still make noises, from my head and elsewhere. My wife’s snoring varies considerably, from a rhythmic melodic hum, to chirps, to raspberries, to wheezes.

She’s used an ear-plug for years. Whichever ear is not against the pillow. Now she uses Bose Sleepbuds, but still, only one ear at a time. So when she rolls over from one side to the other, she has to remove one, insert the other. This is more conscious (i.e. wakeful) effort than I’m willing to abide.

I recently started using earplugs. This doesn’t solve the problem, it merely changes the problem. It’s that brain stem thing. Over many generations, the male side of our family has been conditioned that “as the man of the house,” it is our responsibility to remain alert to out-of-the-ordinary noises, so that should the Vikings come a-pillaging, we can spring into defense of our homes and villages… laughable as that may be in reality. So, earplugs that stifle the noise that keep me from falling asleep just irritate my brain stem because I won’t hear the smoke alarm, the phone ring, burglars breaking in, or police helicopter overhead tracking the bad guys through the back yards. Yes, I do watch too much TV, and no, it has not helped.

What I need is a combination of 2 things, both of which already exist on the App Store:

• Sleep/Meditation Sounds
  …of which I’ve found some really cool ones
• Baby Monitor / Remote Mic

Though it should be possible to do this with simply my current and immediately previous iPhones, I’ve cobbled together a solution that is almost there. Needs a little refinement. Start with sleep sounds, which mostly is for masking…

Because I’m a Ham Radio guy, and musician, I’ve got multiple computers and audio gear. There’s a six-channel mixer on my desk, in my office, which is directly downstairs from our bedroom. So, although I could do it with one computer, I happen to be doing all this with two. Anyway, a 2nd computer has a browser open to the Live365 station pictured above. Its output is one of the sliders on my mixer. It’s not turned up very much.

There’s also a boom mic plugged into that mixer. That’s pushed up to the nominal 0dB line, but not beyond that to “boosted” (which badly raises the noise floor). If my ears could hear a smoke alarm, or other time-to-wake-up sound, so can this microphone. It’s the same distance from the front door, for example. But it’s not in the same room as the snoring from either of us, which helps.

So that’s the “mix”. Now to get it to a pair of low-profile earbuds which block ambient noise very well, and are low-profile enough to comfortably be in the pillow-side ear.

I was in a KickStarter for one of Decibullz products, & I’ve bought several things from them. I’m impressed.

The “bridge” between the mixer on my desk and the earbuds in the bedroom upstairs is two products from the same company…

I’ve had this kludge running only one night so far, but I was impressed by how well it worked. For one quirky example, as I was winding down toward sleep, I heard a “click…click”. Took me a moment, but realized it was the TX relay for my APRS iGate transmitting on 144.39MHz. It’s a familiar sound. I hear it many times a day as I sit at my desk almost within arm’s reach of the thing. It was familiar. It helped convince my subconscious that if something happens that needs my attention, I will hear it. I can hear “household sounds”.

The ideal solution would be a single iOS app that

• Downloads the sound loops & stores/plays them locally, so I don’t need internet access to use it.
• Has a mixer to set relative volumes of masking/sleeping sound and awareness mic.
• Can use the local iPhone’s mic(s) to be used standalone.
• Can use a 2nd iPhone’s mic(s) in bluetooth or wifi range to hear from elsewhere.

I’m imagining the sleep-deprived young parent who needs to respond to a baby crying down the hall, but would like to not be kept up by their partner’s snoring in the same room.

I had a few problems with the initial location where I’d put the Tune-A-Tenna.

1. Due to surrounding structures, etc., I could only orient the legs E-W, which is the shorter dimension of my lot.
2. Too close to my wife’s office, so QRO was out of the question (while she’s in there).
3. Metal mast interacting with the antenna.

Well – I have some fiberglass pole for a roof snow removal tool that I seldom use. It’s 4′ sections that snap together. So this past weekend I took the Tune-A-Tenna off the metal mast and moved it. I have it at 24′ now, and have one more section of this blue fiberglass pole, but I don’t think I will attempt 28′ until I can figure out a way to attach a bunch of guy lines to it. It’s too flexible for this amount of weight.

Building a higher (hoping 40′ to 50′), more-rigid mast, with at least the top 8′ of it non-conductive, is in the planning phase. When I get that figured out, it will undoubtedly include a pulley system so the main unit of the Tune-A-Tenna can be brought down to the ground gently – no climbing.

However, such as it is, here’s the antenna leg orientation:

With it in this orientation, when I lengthen it to best tune on 3.8Mhz, the ends of the elements are only a couple feet off the ground. Would I LIKE to have a resonant dipole on 160-meters? Yes. But I do not have the acreage. If I ever get on 160, it will probably have to be a loaded vertical, or an hour-glass-shaped sky-loop (no, I don’t think I’ll be doing that). Anyway, on 80-meters, the best SWR I can get is probably a bit over 1.5:1, and I’m sure it’s not a great performer.

On 40-meters, however, this thing dials in such that the SWR meter on the radio doesn’t even light the first little segment – no antenna “tuner” is even in the line. Resonant or nothing. No compromises.

I ran WSPR on it for approximately 12 hours.

By 6am the following morning, I had more hits in Europe & Africa, plus Australia. Then again, 2 watts is a lot for WSPR. I need to do some calculations to try to drive the antenna with something closer to 500mW. That’s when I’ll get a better idea of how well this Tune-A-Tenna performs.

On a completely coincidental note, a few days after I first put the Tune-A-Tenna up, I noticed the RF noise floor jumped way up here. I’m used to having S5 to S7 noise on 80, but not nearly so much on 40 or higher. Well…

That, my friends, is an S-9, hashy, broadband noise floor, on 40-meters. And it’s new.

Fortunately, another thing on my to-do list is to install an emergency power cut-over switch panel, so a few of our household circuits can run on a generator during a power outage. This will give me an opportunity to kill circuits one-by-one and see if the new source of noise is in our house or somewhere else. I hope it’s here. I don’t want to go chasing interference in the neighborhood. Ish.