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Into the new office

There’s some re-arranging going on in the house these days. Finally moving the computer and associated gear back out of the bedroom again and turning one of the rooms into an office/ham shack. The weekend was spent taking the computer apart, cleaning off the layers of accumulated dust and moving everything into the red room.

Getting the computer back up and running was fortunately uneventful, and there were no casualties.

With the new desk location, the pegboard holding all the gadgets is going to need some re-configuring before it goes back on the desk. I’ll end up having some cables running along the floor that I’ll have to cover up, but it’s kind of unavoidable.

It’s not quite the arrangement I had originally envisioned, mostly due to the location of the telephone jack, but it will work for now.

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There goes the TV

After 11 years, the TV has finally died. First it started off with the vertical sync messing up. Turn the TV off for a bit, then it went back to normal. Over a period of a few weeks, the time interval between the TV messing up went down and the length of time I’d have to keep it off to fix went up. The picture is just one very bright flat line across the middle of the screen now.

Time for that technology refresh I’ve been wanting to do.

Of course now I want to take it into the workshop and do an autopsy on the TV to see if there’s anything interesting I can do to it. This seems like it should be an easy problem to fix. Just need to figure out how to fix it and where to apply the fix for this particular TV, which will mean trying to find some schematics for it. I’ll also need to clear off most of the workbench to make room for the TV.

If nothing else, it will be fun to poke around the inside and see what the innards look like.

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QSL card v0.2/v0.3

Rearranged the elements and made it a one-sided card with address information going on the other side.

Version 0.3 adds some captions to the two radiographs. I think I like this better.

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QSL card v0.1

A first stab at my QSL card. I mocked it up in GIMP. Stamp icon clip art is from the Discovery Education’s Clip Art Gallery at DiscoverySchool.com. ARRL diamond logo is from ARRL. The small x-ray is a radiograph of Wilhelm Roentgen’s wife’s hand, made shortly after his discovery of x-rays in 1895. The big x-ray is a radiograph of my Yaesu VX8-DR.

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Antenna location, location, location

ZS6BKW variant of the G5RV has been ordered as well as 100′ of RG-8X coax with PL-259 connectors on the ends. Now to figure out where to put the antenna up.

I don’t think I want to have 94′ of wire stringing out in front of the house, so that’s out. There are neighbours on one side of the house, and the power lines/SCEG right-of-way in the back of the house limits the amount of space I can use there.

That leaves the other side of the house, which faces a neighbour’s wooded property. With some assistance, I can probably get the antenna set up in an inverted V arrangement with the apex in one of the trees along the ditch. I just need to make sure the line stays out of the ditch and mark it so that the people who go through the ditches trimming back vegetation don’t take it out. I thought about maybe securing the ends of the antenna to the house, but that would put the antenna at an angle which I’m thinking would probably end up producing a less than optimal radiation pattern.

It’s too bad the tree behind the house didn’t survive the house construction. It would have been a great antenna mast.