Thursday, April 29, 2021
Been a while since I posted here, so I thought I would offer an update of what I’ve been doing.
For starters, precious little of my time the past couple of weeks has been devoted to ham radio. My wife and I drove up to Washington D.C. for a quick visit with our daughter and son-in-law. I don’t have radios in the cars right now, so I was RF free for the entire trip — thankfully I could pull up some web-based SDRs to copy my usual 75-meter roundtables.
I didn’t get back up into the shack until a couple of nights ago. The CW traffic net had to manage for more than a week without me … from what I see in the reports, they managed just fine without me. I got to spend some extra time in the shack this evening, which was therapuetic.
A big plus was the arrival today of my latest CW key — a Elecraft-branded Bencher Hex key. The Bencher Hex key apparent has been out of production for a while; I’m not sure when the Elecraft model was offered, but the earliest reviews for the Elecraft Hex key are dated 2005.
The key is SN 495 and arrived in excellent shape. I haven’t had the chance to wire it up, but the paddle has a really nice feel to it.
Critics of the Hex key note that the key’s adjustments suffer the same problem as the Bencher BY series — the coarse threads of the adjustment screws. I never had a problem adjusting the BY-1s that I own; true, you have to be careful, but the adjustments have never been difficult.
And its important to note that I’m not a high-speed CW op; any comments or reviews I make about a CW key should have a caveat that I’m a 15 wpm and under operator. I don’t have a damn clue about the needs of 30 wpm-plus ops have, so take my CW key comments with a proverbial grain of salt.
IN THE SHACK. I haven’t moved equipment in or out of the shack lately. I’m still using the Ten-Tec Omni 5.9 (with the N4PY chip), and I love the radio. It’s very basic compared to my FTDX-3000 and even my IC-756PROII, but it holds its own. I love listening to the receiver, and the 500 Hz CW filter is bulletproof. I wouldn’t mind pickup up the 1.8 kHz filter, and the 250 Hz filter.
I’ve made no progress on moving the main shack up to Studio C. I have cleaned up junk in Studio C to make room for main shack equipment, but I have more to go.
ANTENNA REPAIR. While mowing the grass this week I found that my 300-ohn twinlead to my main dipole is broken. It broke at one of the two splices in the feedline, which was a weak point anyway. Eventually I’m going to have the feedline go up to Studio C. I’ll probably repair the line (again) with an eye on replacing the entire feedline at some point in the future.
The 300-ohn twinlead I use was part of a large spool of TV-grade feedline that’s worked fine in every antenna I’ve made with it. But I’m about out of that spool of feedline, so until I find another 500-foot spool, I’m probably going to buy 300-ohm feedline from the Wire Man — the stranded 300-ohm “window” line is what I’m interested in. I’ve had too many balanced feedlines with solid copper and copperweld wire, and they just have never lasted as long as the more flexible TV-grade twin lead.
73 es CUL … de KY4Z … SK …. SK … (dit dit) …