Author: Eugene

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Overheating

When I woke up this morning and the house was 28°C (82°F), I didn’t have a good feeling about it. The blower inside the house was running, but the heat exchanger thing outside was just making a buzzing noise but wasn’t running. Not a good sign.

After last year’s maintenance inspection, I was expecting that the unit had finally failed and was going to need to replace it. Today being a holiday, I wasn’t expecting to be able to get anybody out to check on it until Thursday or Friday, but when I called the company (Carolina Air Care) was able to send someone out this afternoon, much to my surprise. It took a while for them to get out here (busy day for them it seems), but once the technician got here it only took him one look to diagnose the problem: a blown capacitor on the heat exchanger. A quick replacement and the unit was up and running once again.

The repair wasn’t cheap, but it was a whole lot less expensive than what I was expecting. Hopefully this will keep things running a little while longer and give me a little more time to continue saving to replace the heat exchanger. I know I’m going to have to replace it soon. It would just be nice to have a little more saved up for it before replacing it.

When it starts cooling down, I’ll have them come out again for the annual maintenance inspection and see how much time I might have left on the unit. Hopefully I can get another year out of it before needing to replace it.

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Yaesu VX-8DR X-ray Take 2

Radiographs of my VX-8DR that show the innards a little better. 81 kV, 5 mAs, small focal spot.

The battery (which is actually two batteries)

Yaesu VX-8DR battery

The radio itself

The antenna. If you look closely, you can see some internal structure now, compared to the fluoro image from earlier.

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9 years. 9!

With all the ham radio stuff going on recently, I completely failed to notice that my blog turned 9 years old a little over a week ago. 9 years of random musings, miscellaneous events and maybe a few interesting observations.
First blog entry was June 23, 2003. Now the blog has entered Year 10.
Wow, who’d have thought.

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Yaesu VX-8DR X-ray

Put my VX-8DR under a fluoro unit I was testing today. Fluoro generally doesn’t provide the greatest resolution images, but enough to see what the innards of my radio are like. Will get a regular radiograph later.

Fluoroscopy image of a Yaesu VX-8DR

This is the antenna. Not a whole lot going on aside from a lot of metal.

Yaesu VX-8DR antenna
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I’m playing radio!

Tom (AJ4UQ) managed to catch me playing radio this morning for the last half of Field Day. I spent a few hours logging, and then finally got onto the radio to make some contacts on the 20m and 40m bands.

I operated the radio for a few hours and managed to make a dozen or so contacts from Ohio, Georgia, south Texas and as far away as eastern Massachusetts and Vermont. This was the first time I actually played radio and did any transmitting. It turned out to be a lot of fun and it didn’t take long for me to get too caught up in finding people to contact to be nervous about being on the radio.

The second half of Field Day was noticeably less crazy and frantic than the first half. 20m was still pretty busy, but not nearly as crazy as it was yesterday. 40m was relatively quiet compared to yesterday, and after a few hours it felt like we had run out of people to contact, because we kept running into the same ones while sweeping through the band.

I did manage to catch W1AW (ARRL’s station) on the air and tried to get them in the log, but I’m not sure they were able to receive me, or else I was just too caught up in their pileup. Also tried to see if I could get Bionic_Nerd too, while she was up in the Boston area on her road trip, but no such luck. She did manage to hear me calling part of the call sign I was using (WA4USN belonging to CARS), but I wasn’t able to pick her up at all. Maybe another time.

Field Day wrapped up at 2PM with just over 200 contacts logged at the phone station. Not sure how the other stations did. After spending a couple more hours cleaning up, putting things away and loading various vehicles it was time to call it a day.

Field Day turned out to be a pretty fun experience on the radio, and there’s nothing like a baptism by fire to get you involved in something.

My pictures from Field Day are up on Flickr.