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Well, that was a first.

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    The prototype worked well enough that I'll proceed on to another iteration. Leaning it out with two legs held up by the radial wire worked well, and the little knobs on the top of the spool to hold the wire in place work fine. I'll made them a touch larger to be more robust, but the concept works.I want to be able to fit 12m of wire on the spool, because I want radials that work well as flat radials on 40m, which might take up to 28%λ instead of the nominal ¼λ which would be appropriate in the "discone" setup with 45° radials. However, with this wire, 8m barely fits on this spool. So I need to add a generous allowance for more wire.I need a handle for the hub at the bottom so that I can wind it up with the legs removed. It's unwieldy with two 6' long fiberglass stakes.According to DJØIP, 1 elevated, tuned radial is roughly equivalent to 8 ground radials. Two of these should give me the performance of 16 ground radials. According to his table, I can expect 3.76dB gain over my usual 4 radials on the ground, or even more if I'm using a shortened antenna.With these just leaning, if someone inadvertently walks into my bright pink wire, they'll probably just knock over the leaning posts, which is unlikely to cause a big problem. I'll probably use bullet connectors for the other end of the wire so that they can pop out and not knock the antenna over.
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    Today's #HamRadio #POTA (Parks On The Air) adventure. Absolutely gorgeous, couldn't-be-better fall weather on a Saturday, so that it was a little surprising that we found parking space and that all the picnic tables were empty. Used my spiderbeam push-up mast to hold my inverted-v linked dipole up, tied the ends out to some trees, and got on the air on 20 meters, using CW (morse code) as usual. I first hunted operators in other parks and got 4 QSOs, but the pileups were deep, so I found a quiet frequency and called CQ. I didn't have to wait for responses, either! Some pileups were so deep they sounded like modem noise (showing my age here). A little intimidating for the new CW operator, but the other operators were patient with me.AZ is one of the states I haven't gotten in my hunter logs yet, so I was happy to see AZ pop up for one call sign. However, that operator reported IL, so I still don't have AZ. I'll have to keep hunting!By the end, I was getting a lot of QRM (interference from human sources). That's the curse of operating QRP (low power) — I'm sure they couldn't hear my measly 5W and weren't intentionally operating on top of me. That was OK, though; I had 31 QSOs and I was ready to QRT (quit) for the day.
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    We had a surprise opportunity to go to the beach this weekend, near Southport NC. I have the weird preference to sling my hammock under the house, between the clotheslines, instead of sleeping indoors. Half camping? I use a big rubbermaid box as my "suitcase" and put my shoes on it overnight... It was cold at night, but an underquilt and reflecting bubble insulation in the hammock, with an inflatable mattress on top of my down sleeping bag, kept me cozy.My wife and I went to Fort Fisher State Recreation Area and set up a pair of #HamRadio transceivers. Because this weekend was SSB CQ World Wide DX contest, she couldn't find an empty space to call CQ, and had trouble breaking through pileups, so after a few QSOs she decided it wasn't fun any more and read a book. It was not the CW CQ DX contest weekend, so I successfully activated US-3842 with Morse code. Then back at the beach house, I kept ducking out onto the porch to hunt #POTA operators using CW, with a 33' random wire antenna hanging from a spiderbeam pole, connected to the 9:1 port on my tiny little homebrew QRP dual-port unun. One of those QSOs was with the ham who sold me my KX3 that I used to make the contact! 🎉I gave the random wire a workout with QSOs on 40, 30, 20, 17, and 15 meters. Tried hunting with no luck on 80, 12, and 10 meters.The wind eventually broke the antenna wire off the terminal, so I'll want to fix that before going out again. But at the beach, it was easy to bodge that by stripping back a bit of insulation and screwing the bare wires in the terminal.
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    In order to 3d print a little amplified speaker box to use for #HamRadio SSB 2-operator POTA with my wife, I want to model components and then model the box to go around them. I found a speaker on grabcad that is only a few mm different from the speaker I found in my bin. Just different enough that I need to start over to create a good basis for my box model. I didn't bother constraining everything perfectly when modeling the steps in the metal shell, and I didn't model the cone accurately because those really don't matter that much. It's good enough to check for interference.I have barrel and XT60 power connectors already modeled from my last project to choose from here, but I need to add models for the 3.5" phono jacks and the TDA2050 amplifier board I bought from Amazon. Trying to decide whether to use that completely as-is or desolder the potentiometer for the volume control and use wires to re-route it to a more convenient place. A model might help answer that question.Not quite #FreeCADFriday unless you give me about 22 hours of grace. 😀