I guess this is more of a personal update, but I’ve been pretty busy most helping out some friends with projects, as well as going on a much needed vacation, that I managed to include a couple of my hobbies in…
Motorcycling
After doing some basic maintenance and an oil change, I rode the bike down to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. Other than the I-95 portion where people are absolutely nuts, the ride was actually smooth sailing and the scenery is pretty cool driving through Maryland and Virginia.
One interesting take away while doing bike maintenance was checking the battery. The battery was brand new and I just installed a couple weeks prior, and have done a ride or two since then. I had no issues but decided to check the battery cables as part of my “getting ready” process, and found they actually came loose, so when checking your bike for the summer, include your battery cables and other wiring as well! (We had one person in the group lose a ground due to a faulty connection.)
Since the weather was nice, a group of us decided to ride to Ocracoke, NC, which is more or less an all day affair from the norhtern Outer Banks if you’re just having fun and hitting the lighthouses on the way. It’s an absolutely awesome ride that includes a ferry trip as well!
Ham Radio
I actually managed to build my first “Go Box” for my radio, and packed my Yaesu FT-857D and MFA portal tuner into a briefcase. To power the rig I picked up an Alinco DM-330MVT power supply that’s a lot smaller and lighter than my old 30 amp linear supply that probably weighs 40+ pounds. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to include the power supply into the briefcase setup but put the power supply, antennas, and cables into a large backpack, so I got everything down to 2 “containers”. In addition, I also managed to set up Ham Radio Deluxe (free version) and FLDIGI on my Dell Venue 8 laptop running Windows 10. Both actually work somewhat well with the touch screen!
The end goal was to be able to use the radio while on vacation, and while I did, I didn’t use it as much as I intended. I really wanted to be able to transmit out and play around, but after a long day on the beach I just wasn’t too up to fiddling with setting up antennas and slinging coax. I did do some listening and can say that I’ve heard some stations as far away as California and Canada. I fully expected to hear some European stations being so close to the coast (all of 200 feet away) but I think the time difference killed that idea.
Speaking of antennas…it was (sadly) my first attempt at using my Alpha Antennas “Ez-Military” antenna that I bought at Dayton Hamvention a few years ago (I think they now call it a Chameleon or something like that). While it worked ok given the bands, I wasn’t thrilled with how far the antenna bent over with North Carolina winds. I never really tried to transmit much. I kept the entire setup as-is and will hopefully be trying it again soon before field day. Hopefully setting it all up in daylight may help 🙂
There’s a lot more to report; but I’ll end it here for now. I do have some more updates on my vintage computing front, and yet more interesting pieces of Franklin Institute memorabilia to post up. Stay tuned!