First define “normal”…
I spent Monday and Tuesday doing lots of “amateur radio releated activities” but not as much “on air time” as I would normally get. If you remember I had lots of issues with RFI locking up my HRD/Logging computer whenever I re tuned with the auto tuner after a frequency change during the ARRL SSB Sweeps. Strange as it seems the 100w signal on SSB caused no ill effects but the 10w tone while the autotuner did its thing (either autotuner – Internal or External) would knock out my computer. I had assumed that it was some sort of issues with an addition of a couple more radials just before the contest started. This might of been true but the problem did go away after I spent a couple of hours on Monday carefully routing the radials and resecuring them radials and the feed line in my back yard…
Everything was performing flawlessly on Tuesday and then the snow arrived here on Tues late evening and carried on to Wednesday am and my backyard was covered by approx 3 inches of a heavy slushy wet snow… Wednesday am when I went to check a frequencie I noticed that the old problems were back. Now the only difference between Tuesday and today is the addition of the snow. There is an easy way to check this out as the temps are supposed to rise again by the weekend and I am expecting to have a brown back yard by Friday as compared to the white back yard today. Either way… I still gotta work on the problems….
If you have laffed at my earlier attempts you know that I have added groundstraps to all the gear except the laptop (no where to attach a ground strap) and all cables have terroids or chokes attached to both ends of them. I have an ugly balun choke at the antenna end of the coax and a terroid choke where it attaches to the auto tuner. The patch cord that runs from the auto tuner to the radio has chokes at both ends of it and the usb to serialport cable that attaches to the FT450 has chokes at both ends as well. No as we had no issues on Tuesday (before the snow) and have the problems today (after the snow) I am assuming that the radials have something to do with it and the snow is making things more efficient and some how some RF is excaping the chokes and terroids and finding its way into my laptop. Looks like I will be buying that new desktop I was drooling over. I am of the opinion that the metal case of the desktop combined with the fact I will be able to connect the desktop to my grounding system it should eliminate the RFI problem. In the meantime I will have to disconnect the control cable and manually do the logging thing and QSY thing so I don’t have to reboot when I try to chase DX.
If you check my on line log page here on the blog you will notice that while I was doing the checking of the changes I had done yesterday I managed a few contacts on the higher bands. England and the Great State of Tennessee on 15m and Puerto Rico on 10m. The contact with John AJ4L was really interesting because it turned to to be a 15 minute (or so) ragchew and I feel I made a new friend. Not the usual TNX for the contact your 5/9 QRZ??? but we chatted about radios, antennas and operating conditions. We even managed to get compare WX comparisions although his 70 deg F did make my 7 deg C seem cold… Here it was… John had worked the English station (2E0UDX) on 15 just before I did and when I finished my contact I heard “Bob take it up 10″ so I went up 10 and ID’d myself and the next time I was actually having a conversation rather than exchanging signal reports. It was fantastic and something I must try again… No DXing or net QNI but actually talking on the radio…
If you live in Eastern Ontario let the weather melt the snow…. Remember your age and your heart if you insist on shovelling your walk of that very wet and heavy snow… It should all be melted by Friday and a couple of days of a shushy sidewalk shound not hurt you…. The alternative could do more than hurt… Check out some Ottawa Newspaper stories on the storm ….
And yes that is a City Transit Bus sitting on its side in the Ottawa Citizen article
To my American Neighbors …. Happy Thanksgiving…. as this is your weekend… We hold Canadian Thanksgiving in October so we can travel to be with our families before the snow gets nasty…
73bob
