Grounding work

Posted by sm2wmv on May 15, 2013

I spent a few days down at SJ2W. I had a couple of computers I had gotten from work that will fit well into the shack upgrading a couple of the computers a bit. It’s old P4 but the latest models and with 4GB RAM, so they will be useful as logging computers. SM2XJP said he could come up and get them so I got to ride with him down to the QTH and when I got there SM2LIY was already there.

The weather was bad most of the days but I managed to get the inband electronics installed and me and SM2LIY played around a bit trying it out in CQ-M. I decided to try a W7IUV preamp instead of the MMIC I had built but after a little while the W7IUV acted very strange and I suspect I fried it, so we put the MMIC back and it seem to work OK. However we plan to move the vertical to a location which is SE from the main antennas, which should be a direction that we rarely beam much, especially not with the bigger antennas. I noticed a problem though which I have made a little card with a micro-controller that will solve.

I got a lot of stuff attached to the ground system we laid down last year. Now I feel quite confident in the grounding of the shack, and since the coaxes between the barn and shack gets disconnected, only direct path from the antennas to the shack are the control cables. I will add GDTs to these along with the MOVs that are already in place.

Me and SM2XJP also went to SM2RMG and picked up two K-600 tower sections, manufatured by the CUE DEE company which was created by the famous SM2DMU. SM2RMG had gotten them from work and gave them to us for free. One will be used to help making the foundation of the military tower. SM2UVU is working on making a plate that attaches the base bearing to the K-600 tower section.

Keep tuned…

Hopefully I’ll spend most of next week down at the QTH getting more work done.