Equipment | N4BC

Miscelleney …

The repeater antenna has been repositioned and braced against excessive sway, and all repeater operations are back to normal. If you recall, high winds had blown the antenna into the tower and one of the elements had hung on the tower structure.

Six meters FT4 and FT8 were busy this afternoon. Seems like Cycle 25 is heating up

I picked up a new “Pocket Portable” iambic key from CWMORSE this week. It’s 3D printed and is really nice quality. I’m looking forward to getting out into the field with it soon.

Field day is coming up soon. Our club, in concert with several others, is mounting a combined operation, as we have in past years. Hopefully, it’ll be a great event.

73 de Dick N4BC

Oops …

Somehow, out main repeater antenna has flexed a bit too much! From the picture, it looks like the top may have flexed into the tower structure and gotten caught. We’ll be going to the site on Saturday morning to further evaluate the problem. I haven’t seen the actual antenna yet … just this photo that was sent to me. We’ve still got the backup antenna if needed.

73 de Dick N4BC

Spring has Sprung …

The days are longer than the nights, propagation is trending better, the trees and flowers are in bloom, and the temperatures are beginning to feel spring-like … Spring must surely be here!

It’s time to break out the portable gear and give it a good going over and cleaning. I anticipate being more successful in getting out into nature to operate this year … last year was a TOTAL failure due to the pandemic.

73 de Dick N4BC

New IC-7300 Firmware

Icom has finally released new firmware for the IC-7300 transceiver. Version 1.40 is available here. Lots of nice new features. Make sure you follow the instructions for the upgrade (back up your settings first, put the downloaded .dat fie in the IC-7300 folder on the SD card, etc. The manual has complete instructions on how to upgrade, and you can find innumerable videos on youtube showing how to do it. Youtube is your friend 🙂

73 de Dick N4BC

It’s Baack …

As of yesterday afternoon, the W4MT UHF & VHF FM repeaters were back on the air. We got the repeater cabinet moved to the new site and connected everything up and threw the power switch to ON!

As usual, it was not without its hiccups. Although everything had checked out before installing, the reflected power was high. That was resolved to a bad connector and remedied. Then we found that the control receiver was not working … that was a bad 1-amp fuse.

Finally, everything was up and working properly. We left well enough alone and wrapped up our endeavor for the day. We’ll go back and take care of grounding and cable dressing shortly.

It’s really nice to hear the repeater back on the air. Actually, it has been operational, but with limited range due to compromises with the antenna height. Now, with the antenna at a decent height, it sounds great.

TBC

73 de Dick N4BC