We had a blustery cold front roar through the county last night, and boy did it roar. We had measured winds of nearly 70 mph.
The winds took down my dipole. It appears the porch swing blew off the porch and tumbled around the side of the house, got tangled in my feedline and the weight — and winds — pulled my dipole apart, apparently at the center insulator. I've not yet looked it over too closely. The slack rope over the top of the tree pulled so far until a knot in the line caught in a fork, then the antenna wire broke. I'll probably lower it the rest of the way and repair it and pull it back up — if that's the extent of the damage.
I bought a recurved bow to shoot a line over the tree at a higher position. I still need to get some arrows for that. Right now I just want to get the antenna fixed. Thankfully I don't have to replace the line over the tree.
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I designed a sidetone circuit of sorts for Old Ironsides, my Hallicrafters SR-150. Basically it will be a 12v powered relay with a buzzer. The relay will key the rig; the key will be in the 12v line. The real question will be the sidetone itself. I've got a piezo buzzer, and I suspect its too damn loud. I'm going to adjust the voltage, and we'll see if I can adjust the volume that way. I may have to mute it with tape or some other method.
I built an MCW interface I used to provide CW lessons on 2-meter FM simplex, and it was a simple single transistor oscillator that provided a 700 Hz audio tone at a low level that worked excellent with my 2-meter rig. The interface I built didn't have an audible sidetone (I was using a keyboard keyer with a sidetone), but adding a simple op amp audio amplifier was an option.
I found another MCW circuit that uses a 555 timer chip, and its quite simple. Uses a few discrete components and a speaker. I'm going to try the piezo buzzer, but may fall back on the 555 circuit.
It may sound silly to worry with a sidetone “box” when I could simply hook up a keyboard keyer, but the truth is I'm not interested in using a keyboard on Ironsides, I want to use one or more of my bugs.
Time to QRT … 73.