Anita (AB1QB) and I are members of the Yankee Clipper Contest Club (YCCC) and we had the opportunity to give a presentation Station Design and Building at the YCCC Meeting this past weekend. The meeting also included two other excellent presentations:
“How to be a better single operator” by Randy Thompson, K5ZD
“Field Day from a Sailboat” by Chet Slabinski, N8RA
Our presentation was well received and the YCCC is a great group of contesters who are quite technically advanced in our hobby. We’ve updated our Station Building Series to include some of the latest information on these topics as well as the latest version of our presentation which may be found here.
Fred Lloyd AA7BQ, President And Founder Of QRZ.com
We recently had the pleasure of a visit from Fred Lloyd, AA7BQ, the President and Founder of QRZ.com. Fred is doing a series articles titled “QRZ Featured Shacks” and he visited us to take photographs and gather background information on our station for a future Featured Shack article on QRZ.com.
Fred is very well-connected in the International Amateur Radio community and he shared a great deal of very interesting information about QRZ.com and Amateur Radio in general. The story around how QRZ.com came to be and the scope of its user community is a very interesting one! QRZ.com has approximately 500,000 registered users of which about 300,000 are active on the site a regular basis. The QRZ.com user community averages approximately 60,000 visits to the site a day. The QRZ.com website is currently hosted on Amazon Web Services S3 and serves approximately 600,000 pages a day or 18 million pages per month – quite a high-scale website! Fred has a number of interesting projects going to enhance the QRZ.com services including some pretty major enhancements to the QRZ.com logbook and related services.
George W9EVT’s Shack
One of the interesting stories that Fred shared with us was his experiences visiting George’s (W9EVT) station on Washington Island, WI. George has a collection of just about every Ham Radio ever made in his shack! You can read more about George’s station in Fred’s article titled “Washington Island’s HAM Radio Treasure” on QRZ.com.
Fred took many photographs and spent quite a bit of time learning about Anita’s (AB1QB) and my background, our Amateur Radio projects and experiences, and the design and construction of our station. He also took quite a few pictures as background for his upcoming article. Some of my favorites include a nice panoramic view of our shack:
Our Shack
and a great shot of our tower and antennas.
Our Tower And Antennas
He also took quite a few pictures of some of the details of our station including this one of me (AB1OC) standing at the base of our tower next to the hard-line coax cables used to feed our antennas.
AB1OC By The Tower
Anita and I really appreciate all of the time that Fred spent with us and the opportunity to have our shack be included in one of his upcoming articles on QRZ.com. I believe that the internet and websites like QRZ.com will continue to play an increasing important role in the evolution and growth of the Amateur Radio hobby.
We have created quite a few posts (over 85) on our Blog to date. I think its important to make all of this information easier to locate and use so I’ve categorized each post and included these categories on the left side of our Blog pages (see the CATEGORIES section of the left of this page). You can click on a category such as “Antennas and Feedlines” and view all of our posts related to this topic. I also plan to create set of master posts which points to all of the information here on topics of broad interest to our readers. The first of these posts covers Amateur Radio Station Design and Construction. Other index posts are planned on Antennas and Contesting. We would appreciate your comments and suggestions as to the usefulness of the categories and master index posts.
As many probably know, the northeast was hit by Hurricane Sandy, a huge storm this past week. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all of the people who were effected or hurt by this tragic weather event. The pictures of the devastation in New York City and New Jersey, USA are unbelievable and saddening.
Several of our friends have asked how we and our station fared during this major weather event. We sustained only minor impacts due to some 50+ mph wind gusts – many branches down and the top SteppIR DB36 Yagi on our tower turned on the mast. We also experienced an early life failure in our K0XG Ring on Saturday prior to the storm. A power rectifier failed and left us unable to turn the ring. Fortunately, the ring failure left the lower of our two SteppIR DB36 Yagis pointed in a safe direction relative to the highest winds during Hurricane Sandy. We were without power for several hours on Monday evening but our generator covered for that nicely. The turned antenna and the failed rectifier were easily corrected after the storm passed and we are back to normal here. All in all, the new Antenna System came through the storm quite well. Thanks to everyone for their concerns for us.
As I have previously mentioned, Anita and I are relatively new HAMs and we are always looking for good sources of information to learn more about the hobby. One such source that we particularly enjoy is the Practical Amateur Radio Podcast and other HAM resources provided by Jerry Taylor, KD0BIK. Jerry authors a series of podcasts where he talks about his experiences as a new HAM and we have found the information in his podcasts useful and entertaining. Jerry has assembled a wealth of HAM radio information and resources which can be found here. Jerry authors several other HAM radio related blogs including one related to his Summits On The Air (SOTA) activities and another related to his HAM Radio interests and activities in general.
We connected our Weather Station to Weather Underground via the internet. This site provides more historical measurements and trends using the data from our station. To see the information from our station on Weather Underground, click here.
We’ve had our Blog in operation for about a week now and I think its a good time to get some feedback on what our readers are finding most interesting. We’ve had the opportunity to participate in a pretty broad range of amateur radio activities in the bit under two years since we have been licensed. I’d like to have our reader’s input on what sort of material might be most interesting to post here. Please take a moment to provide us some input. You may choose your top three items from the following poll and you can use the “Other” choice to add something else that you think would be interesting or useful. Thank you for you time and input.
We have long wanted to add a Weather Station at our QTH. We attended the Dayton HAM Fest this year and had a chance to talk with the folks at Davis Instruments and to look at their weather stations. We decided to take advantage of their show special and purchase a Vantage Vue Weather system. We also purchased their WeatherLink IP option as well as an additional Vantage Pro2 console for the system. These options will allow us to connect the weather station to the internet so that we can use our iPhones and iPads as well as PCs to monitor the weather at home from anywhere in the world. Finally, we are going to fabricate a custom tower standoff mount for the station. Stay tuned for a future post showing the installation and the final results of our weather station project.
