A Crummy Commercial

I was having trouble with a couple of weak stations.  The first was WDOR-FM, 93.9 MHz, the station I listen to the Brewers on.  One night the signal got noisier and noisier - then I realized that the rabbit ears (from an old TV set) with a shorting wire to make them a loop was the problem.  So I removed the shorting wire and then shortened up each each of the rods to 30 inches (half of the roughly 5 foot long antenna from 468 / 93.9).  This was audibly better ! BTW, I stopped trying to catch the Brewers games on the originating station, WTMJ 620 in Milwaukee (180 miles away) which isn't as strong as WDOR-FM in Sturgeon Bay (50 miles away). Next I was having trouble hearing my 11 meter thermometer beacon on CB channel 4 (27.05 MHz).  So I made up a quick indoor dipole by using the 468 / f formula again.  Made the dipole from some old twisted pair and the remaining skinny coax from MFJ. it was a nicely made thingy but I was never going to use it with an HT in...

After futzing with NanoVNA Saver and various computers, also spending time looking for a USB soundcard (for a different project) I finally just hooked the NanoVNA to my 30 meter inverted V.  This SWR plot explains a lot: 10.7 MHz, that's the IF frequency of FM receivers !  To me this says that I cut the antenna too short, who does that ?  It is still kind of cold and windy for antenna work (and tomorrow is supposed to be a deluge) so I will delay messing with the antenna for now.  Also remembered that the pulley at the top of the pole isn't working so the antenna will have to be taken down to ground level.   No wonder the K2 tuner couldn't find a 1:1 match !   Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

I thought this was a really interesting video: source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTDFhWWPZ4Q Rarely do any programs on Amelia Earhart's last flight get into any of the technical details like this one does.  They usually just say that she wasn't a good radio operator and that navigator Fred Noonan was a drunk.  And I didn't realize about the increased engine noise, even with headphones it would be hard to hear a null with the equivalent of a zillion leaf blowers bolted to the air frame. About the only RDF receiver I have is the Heathkit MR-1010 which I've mentioned before: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-heathkit-mr-1010.html Older Heathkit RDF receivers had one feature the MR-1010 doesn't have, they also covered into HF - but after seeing this video I can see how that wouldn't necessarily be useful for direction finding.  So Heath must have decided to leave out any coverage above the AM broadcast band. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/...

Mentioned it previously here: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/12/warped-perception.html I had three empty cans of beans, they are the kind with only 1 seam and the bottom has a small lip that makes them easy to stack.  Wouldn't they be a good 21st century substitute for the steel beer cans of the 1950s ? . But even a 10 meter vertical would require roughly 24 cans (cans are about 4.25 inches high, a CB whip is something like 102 inches long, 102/4.25 = 24). That's a lot of beans !  I wish I'd thought of this before stamping all those cans flat ! In the QST article (November 1955)  W2JTJ just soldered the cans together - no brazing or welding was required - and he was doing a 40 meter antenna, quite a bit longer at 82 cans. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

So that's why the TV antenna rotator stopped working !!  No wonder with only two of the three rotator cable wires still intact. Since there really isn't much TV activity around here and since the antenna post had been bouncing against the house during a recent storm, I took the silly antenna down.  I think an antenna element may still be lying on the roof.  The antenna wasn't too bad for $30 when purchased 25 years ago but time came to cut the wires and run ! (semi-obligatory ham radio/Field Day reference) I can still receive the local PBS translator station in Ellison Bay with an inside the garage antenna.  If I get ambitious I have a little two bow tie antenna and a nice preamp that I could setup somewhere but that'll wait till spring/summer. It was 40 F here Saturday so at least I got outside and accomplished something. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm    

. This is an interesting video: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh88Y2_33GI The most interesting quote (at about 2 min 40 sec):      "The FLR-9 is made primarily out of wood and out of copper, which you would never guess" I remember being told in the 20th century that NSA stood for Never Say Anything, but maybe that has changed :) Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

. Here is a brief article on the beginning of a effort to preserve the antenna used by two AT&T Bell Lab guys to discover the cosmic microwave background.  It was instrumental in their sharing of the Nobel Prize. https://spectrum.ieee.org/cosmic-microwave-background I remember a couple of things about the cosmic microwave background from college.  First, that this red-shifted radiation from the big bang represents a temperature of roughly 3 degrees Kelvin (above absolute zero).  And second, that heat transfer due to radiation of a warm mass to the surroundings is proportional to the delta T (difference in temperature) raised to the fourth power. So if you go outside, lightly dressed, on a clear, calm summer evening and just stand around looking at the stars you'll find yourself feeling cold rather quickly, your body is radiating to that 3 degree Kelvin canopy of space. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

. I saw a couple of web articles recently on an experiment done to see if laser beams could be used to guide lighting strikes: https://spectrum.ieee.org/lasers-seed-lightning https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/lasers-used-to-guide-lightning-strikes-to-a-safe-target/ This is pretty neat but probably no applications to ham radio, the laser is really powerful (expensive ??) and the results weren't perfect but a cool idea to try. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

 Recently I've seen some pictures of bugs and sounders from the middle days of wired telegraphy.  And that got me looking at an early wireless telegraphy book: https://worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Technolgy-Early/Wireless-Telegraphy-and-Telephony-Morgan-1920.pdf Before proceeding, I thought this dedication was interesting: Alfred P. Morgan was a fan of Tesla One thing that struck me were the drawings and pictures of multi-wire antennas.  The first drawing of a transmitter shows an antenna with multiple wires and that "fan" connection that probably gave rise to the antenna symbol used in schematic drawings. Here is a photo of an amateur antenna and shack: This all reminded me of that famous Sarnoff/Einstein/Steinmetz photo mentioned previously in the blog: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/06/famous-people-meeting-or-not-plus-ultra.html   Sarnof, Einstein and Steinmetz The tangle of stuff above the heads of the group appears to be the terminus of a mighty multi-...