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Ed Fong Antenna Troubleshooting

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As program director for my club, I had Ed Fong do his standard presentation last year. He does these by request for clubs across the country and then offers a discounted group buy to the club afterward. I've built one clone of an Ed Fong DBJ and currently use it as well as two purchased antennas at my house for a base station, VHF Winlink and APRS. Below I’ve included my personal notes on installing Ed Fong antennas that I’ve gleaned either from Ed himself or my experience with them over the past year. The bottom approx. six inches in the pipe is just coax and not active antenna. This is for clamp mounting to a mast. Gluing/cementing the top cap is optional. If you are suspending the antenna from the top it is highly recommended. Gluing the bottom cap (with the coax connection) WILL void your warranty. These still seal quite well with compression. Paint of some kind is strongly encouraged. PVC degrades under UV light. Ed recommends regular rustoleum (avoid metallic colors, hammered...
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Remote Switching Power to Radios

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 I run a Winlink RMS at the house and occasionally encounter software issues that will take it offline for a few hours. This gets frustrating when Trimode encounters a serial port or soundcard error and spends hours trying to self correct. Trimode has a mechanism to prevent an excessive number of restarts but it is excessively high and out of all its menus there isn't one to change this setting lower. All of the Winlink sysop programs  include a feature for offline notifications but if you're hardware/software are offline and the Winlink programs still have connections to the CMS  you won't receive these notifications. In those instances where Trimode is struggling, it will go through all of its restarts (approx. 50) then stop itself and the minimum alert time is 2 hours after that failure to start. I've done all I can in Windows registry to standardize my USB devices so the programs always find their designated device but things still pop up intermittently. I have the...
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Peltor to Ham Radio

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 I have a Peltor Comtac 3 headset because reasons. I got it to use with my Motorola handhelds, primarily the XTS2500. For a long time I have wanted to adapt the two PTTs that came with it to work on other radios I own. Today I'm attempting to adapt it for a Yaesu FT-991A These come with the 6 pin NATO connector, U-229, described on Cryptomuseum, here . I need to remove this cable and add my own. I'll be adding two since few ham radios have audio in and out all on one connector. First I have to identify the function/color of each wire. Pins on the connector are labeled A-F with corresponding functions below: GND A SPK B PTT C MIC D EXP E EXT F I keep all pinouts I identify in a  Google Sheet  of pins, wire colors, and functions with pictures where able. I got the functions from that Cryptomuseum link above.  Disassembly of the U-229 is simple with a wrench and some pliers. Then I add color of each wire to the spreadsheet near the appropriate letter. Inside the PTT we ...
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Satellite Antennas

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 In my never ending quest to continually delay my entry to the CW club, I think my nest hamateur venture will be satellite operations. Multiple satellites with ham radio capabilities orbit the earth at any given moment. One of my favorite youtube channels, saveitforparts , (my new life motto btw), does lots of satellite operations, mainly snooping on commercial, government, and even military satellites. He builds dishes with different low noise amplifiers (LNAs), low noise blockers (LNBs), software defined radios (SDRs), and a bunch of craigslist junk. He just installed a fully automated satellite tracker inside a surplus radome and I could definitely see myself wasting time on similar ventures.  The uber expensive M2 SATPACK, an example of a commercial egg beater antenna. To get my feet wet, I thought the best way would be using these ham radio focused satellites. The only equipment I would need is an antenna. Antennas must be circularly polarized due to the way satellites co...
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HF Nets

 This has been discussed before elsewhere but HF nets are so bizarre. Archaic websites. Obscure membership structures. Shooting fish in a barrel. but simultaneously inefficient where it takes one hour to get one turn.  My main gripe though is the signal reports. If you have to ask a relay for the call sign and repeat the RST multiple times, you were not a 5-5.  I'm actually enjoying this though as it helps me work out some quirks in my home set up while I get ready for more base operations. I found a net that meets late at night so I currently have something to do other than watch youtube. I'll get WAS through them I guess then got for it through LOTW.  My set up so far is the EFHW I installed in the last post which runs through the window, I placed scrap extension cord in the window track to allow the wire to slip through without crimping it while getting an almost complete seal. That goes to my Yaesu FT991A which is hooked up to the computer via USB and my Heil hea...
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Tuning antennas with ChatGPT

 I've messed with a little AI in the past couple of years since LLMs exploded into the mainstream a couple years ago. Results initially were not promising but you just have to ask it to not lie (hallucinate) and not ask it something too obscure (something it's not trained for).  Short story long, I had an EFHW antenna that ran north-south and was long enough for 160m and went over some trees that are probably pushing 100ft. Unfortunately, I used cheap wire and it eventually snapped before I got around to replacing it with copper-clad steel(CCS). After that I put up an OFCD but that was dedicated to my Winlink station. Other than that I have a butterfly T2FD in the attic which is essentially a dummy load. TLDR, I only have one antenna and its committed full time. I just finished my master's and it's the holidays so I have time to kill. There's plenty of house projects to do and the weather's great but night owls like me can only replay COD MW3 so many times. I ha...
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Transfer to blogspot

 I spent a few months trying to get wordpress running in a local instance to work with my ddns address but the way wordpress presents itself on just my local network, not to mention via WAN was over my head. Thus, I have decided to use blogspot which is much simpler meaning I can spend more time poasting and less time dealing with webservers. The three posts previous to this one were what I accrued on that wordpress which I have transferred here and more posts will be forthcoming.
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