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Showing posts with the label chirp

Moving on

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 We are moving on. A couple weeks out of lockdown and we are full speed ahead. Lockdown should not slow down or stop our ham radio, but everyone has a different recaction to the same stimulus. When our mobility is under threat we all experience adverse reactions. At V44KF, I got into the planning and building mode. I developed an interest in the EFHW, "end fed half wave" antenna. Many people seem to build it like an inverted "VEE" or a long wire of sorts, but I am interested in it as a vertical. Vertical antennas, installed correctly and properly, posses the lowest signal take off  angle. The half wave vertical has a lower take off angle than the quarter wave vertical. Check your vertical antenna handbook for take off angle data, or knock yourself out with a 'Google search' for "vertical antennas take off angles". 40-meters is my favorite band, 7.0 mhz  to 7.3 mhz, but that amateur radio band is not useable for amateur radio communications because

Think big today

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It is a very bright and beautiful day in St Kitts and Nevis. I wake at sunrise and see that the grass on my lawn still display rain drops from the early morning shower. The sky is blue and cloudless, but the mountain just West of North are covered with thick clouds. The base of this mountain is only two miles up the hillside from my home, which is less than a mile up the hillside from the beach, and overlooks the Basseterre Bay. There is nothing better in the world than living on an island. Just think about it. If you miss this, you miss one of the secrets of living the "American Dream" on the best islands in the Caribbean. Why is St Kitts and Nevis the best, because the word impossible does not dwell in our vocabulary. Time and again we have proven that the size of our landmass and population does not decide where we can go, nor what we can do on our islands. We all know what happens here, just Google "St Kitts and Nevis" and find out. Among ot