Author Topic: Solar Powered Woodshed  (Read 19524 times)

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ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #33 on: December 03, 2014, 04:59:57 PM »
I remember the Radio Shack/Tandy Corporation partnership.  I had a Commodore 64 (and later a 128) back in the day and used to write programs in BASIC to run on it.  Gosh, that was a long time ago......

Anyway, Radio Shack had a transistor and a little potentiometer that was supposed to be volume control for a radio.  I rigged it up with the output of the sensor to the base, run 12V to the LED's and to the collector on the transistor.  Then bias it with the potentiometer.  It works!

I got a little grey PVC box I'm going to put the whole works in to protect it from moisture, frost, dirt, bugs, etc..  I'll drill a hole in the box lid so the sensor bulb can peek thru it with a little rubber gasket to keep the unwanted stuff out.  It has a pretty surprising azimuthal range - I'd say about 150° to pick up a heat signature and trigger it.  Once triggered it stays on for roughly 10 seconds or so before switching the output after it loses the IR signature.  In the shop at 65 degrees F it has a range of about 20 feet or so.  Outside in the cold wood shed it'll probably have much greater range, but it only needs about 8 foot range in there.

This thing is neater than heck - what did you say they were used for Brian?

Mary B

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #34 on: December 03, 2014, 05:14:22 PM »
Do not seal the box completely or condensation can build up inside. I always mount it with a corner lower than the others and drill a drip hole with a small bit.

Ice cube relays really vary in current draw, 80 to 300ma is common depending on the relay. You could drive a reed relay though and use that to drive the led's.

I will not buy Radio Shack coax, that stuff is typically poorly shielded and high loss. LMR400 minimum, currently every antenna I have is fed with hardline including on HF. Can find new FSJ4-50 cutoffs or reel ends for around $1 a foot and it is slightly lower loss than LMR400.


Tracked down my interference and called the companies who might be the source. Dish farm on the water tower has wireless internet on it, some telephone links, and some local TV and cable links. So one of the three has some failing equipment. Give them a week to repair it then let the FCC know if they don't

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #35 on: December 03, 2014, 09:22:42 PM »
Tracked down my interference and called the companies who might be the source. Dish farm on the water tower has wireless internet on it, some telephone links, and some local TV and cable links. So one of the three has some failing equipment. Give them a week to repair it then let the FCC know if they don't

The roll of coax I bought from Radio Shack is Belden cable - it's high quality stuff.

Gosh, are you sure that VHF, UHF and microwave equipment is cause interference at 4 MHz?

I mean, tonight I got a S-5 noise floor on 80m and 10db over on 160, and there is no powerlines or anything around here to cause it.  It's just atmospheric static.  As the sun gets around to the other side of the planet, the 160m band will quiet down around 1:00AM local time, and then you can work some DX on it.  I'm pulling in the nets on 160m tonight on 1,832 and 1,895 but they're under the noise floor sometimes.  There's a late night net that comes on 160m around midnight and that comes in pretty good here because the noise floor drops to S-7 or so.

Usually noise on those bands is natural background noise and some nights are worse than others.  And it's a known fact that if you live near powerlines or in a city you're going to have serious noise on 80 and 160 meters.

There's an antenna design called the K6STI Receive Loop for 80 and 160 meters that was designed by a guy named Brian Beezley.  Google it and check it out.  It works.  You have to use a regular dipole or a vertical for Tx (you'll probably blow the finals out of your linear if you forget to throw the switch to your Tx antenna and key up), but the K6STI Loop might solve your noise problems on the lower freq HF bands and it's a pretty simple antenna to build.

midwoud1

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #36 on: December 04, 2014, 02:10:42 AM »
Pitty I sold my Collins R-390A / URR , it was good on dx 14 Mc , 500Kc - 32 Mc ,RTTY Siemens T200,
Antenne dipole 14 Mc and long wire low bands ,    BC 221.      W-Fax on VHF
Ago we had Heathkit ,make your own Scope ,Frequency meter , Transceivers ,dataloggers etc.
More challenging than Skype.

tanner0441

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #37 on: December 04, 2014, 07:54:34 AM »
Hi

Those sensors were used in a local holiday camp to stop people leaving lights on. They were on buildings and in corridors as you walked down the corridor the lights came on then went of 10 secs later. They have a single fancy photo detector inside and the dome is a Fresnel lens as the heat source passes the lens it projects moving bands onto the sensor which changes the stability, this is processed in the electronics and trips the output. They were wired with standard burglar alarm cable and unshielded.

As for VHF/UHF upsetting 4 Mhz a lot of the clocks are little modules, TXOs, with a fundamental frequency of 4 to 12 Mhz. and broad band multiplied with the attendant cr**.  There is also a lot of fuss over here with power line adapters, baby alarms, intercoms, etc. and the power companies want to install smart meters in every home so they don't have to send someone out in the cold to take readings, so every piece of wire in the country will have something on it.

As for computers I started with a home made thing based on a telephone switcher board, 2Mhz Z80 running machine code, then I managed to obtain a 2K Palo Alto basic which I didn't like it only did an ASCII sort, after that I built a Nascom II kit. Then I managed to get my hands on surplus commercial gear my ultimate was a Rair black box running MPM and 4 terminals and started programming in Dbase.  I always wanted a PDP eleven running Unix.... Always beyond my wallet...

All my antennas are fed with RG8-X  the longest run is only about 50ft and with 100W don't need anything else. I upset someone the other day when I said if you run enough power there is no such thing as DX.



Brian

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #38 on: December 04, 2014, 10:09:56 AM »
As a ham operator you should identify the source of the problem, then assist the people that have the equipment in solving it.  That is why you have a license instead of just being an "average joe".  I would highly suspect the powerlines because something as simple as a gap between a staple and a ground wire, or a bad insulator, can cause RFI on lower frequencies.  And, as you say Brian, lots of noise on the lines these days because of devices - which the power company can do nothing about.

But if it is just on lower freq's it must be taken into account that we are just getting into the time of year when 80 and 160m get nice and quiet late at night too, despite the fact that we are in the downswing from the latest solar cycle.  When the sun is less active those lower frequencies are much quieter, and while 10m might be dead, 80 and 160m is awesome late at night.

It can be a difficult thing to pinpoint when the noise floor is almost full meter.

That's why I like the digital modes like Olivia.  Olivia has forward error correction and you can many times copy the mail on signals that are below the noise floor.  And don't need more than about 5-10 watts.  It's pretty cool.  SSB phone is highly susceptible to noise and most times when SSB don't work, the digital modes do.  This whole past month has been terrible for noise on the lower freq's and I expect it to get better as we get to the winter solstice and a month to 6 weeks beyond.  I'll make a little video sometime when I get a chance, showing the problems I got with noise here on 80 meters at night when our Farmer's Net comes on - and we don't have any powerlines within 10 miles of here.

I've been meaning to build a 6m yagi because 6m is one of the best bands there is, just that few folks are on it and there's normally nobody to talk to on it.  But there's some guys that monitor 6m about 50-80 miles from here and if we build some nice directional antennas we might be able to get a QSO going on 6 meters on a regular basis.  I just don't have a tower for it right now and not going to be able to put one up until spring.

2 meters around here is as bad as CB and the repeaters are constantly jammed.  A few people on simplex, but mostly on the repeaters.  There's one in the Twin Cities - I think it's 146.080 - and that repeater is busy almost around the clock.  I got a homemade 1/4 wave elevated ground plane antenna for 2m, fed with coax, on a 70 foot tower and I had to take that frequency out of my radio's memory because it was always stalled on it on a scan.  Everybody has abandoned 6m because of 2m and 6m is actually a better band with better range.  There's big groups that run 6m in Europe, not so many in the US.

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #39 on: December 04, 2014, 11:32:36 AM »
Pitty I sold my Collins R-390A / URR , it was good on dx 14 Mc , 500Kc - 32 Mc ,RTTY Siemens T200,
Antenne dipole 14 Mc and long wire low bands

Frans, the Heathkit days are gone.  But that old Collins is really cool.  Those were military radios back in the day.  I remember we had one of those in the electronics room when I was in high school because the teacher, Mr. Vernon was his name, was a ham operator.  That radio had gears in it to tune the front end.  It was really quite the unit.

hiker

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #40 on: December 04, 2014, 01:33:04 PM »
average joe--guess thats me -LOL-had fun with my old cb. on lower side band  ch.37.. use to be able to reach out -in the winter months and talk all around the world..or so it seemed.. i used a 5/8s wave ground plane.. i belive it was like close to 19' in length.
kinda miss those days...now its all quite out their ?   hiker was my handle ............................................
WILD in ALASKA

midwoud1

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #41 on: December 04, 2014, 01:51:33 PM »
Hi Chris. I was interested in Ham Radio by  a teacher in physics . He had a BC 348 militairy receiver, modified for short wave and worked world wide.
We build also RC electronics for our model airplanes (Spitfire)
R390A/URR that was part of the USA Apollo Space Program ( Radio Museum)
I had a Navy version.
Has 24 tubes , and weight 30 kilogram. Had to lift it by 2 man.
Later  I built a rig on VHF 138 Mhz and a photo-faxmachine. Weather sat.
Groundstation for NOAA orbital satellites. Cross yagi antenna with elevation and azimuth control
Photos from the African desert to the Arctic ice. Two times a day.
Later on 1,7 Giga hz. Geostat. Meteosat 0 /0  lat./ lon.
Also Goes sat. USA. relay via Meteosat .Great lakes clear visible.
Also visible: hurrycanes ,sand storms , smoking volcanoes.

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #42 on: December 04, 2014, 02:11:59 PM »
average joe--guess thats me -LOL-had fun with my old cb. on lower side band  ch.37.. use to be able to reach out -in the winter months and talk all around the world..or so it seemed.. i used a 5/8s wave ground plane.. i belive it was like close to 19' in length.
kinda miss those days...now its all quite out their ?   hiker was my handle ............................................

Oh no, 11m is alive and well.  All the locals here run it on 33 (27.335 Mhz) USB and there's giant "rag chews" on 11m every night.  It's as common here to grab the mic and call one of the neighbors as it is for city folks to use their cell phones.  People here got base stations, and mobile rigs in their pickups and tractors and combines.  Everybody runs different channels for their own use, but the calling channel is 33 USB.

Coming off the peak of the solar cycle, the skip from the SW US and Mexico will start to die down in the next couple years.  It was probably a month ago I was making coffee in the morning and I heard a fellow from southern England calling CQ on 27.335 Mhz USB.  I answered back and had a nice 5 minute QSO with that guy on greyline skip using just 12 watts PEP.

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #43 on: December 04, 2014, 03:26:52 PM »
Later  I built a rig on VHF 138 Mhz and a photo-faxmachine. Weather sat.
Groundstation for NOAA orbital satellites. Cross yagi antenna with elevation and azimuth control

Have you ever played with any of the amateur satellites?  There's a guy in town here that built a six meter dish and got together with some guys in Finland that wrote some tracking software.  They built a dish too.  These guys are using a computer to encode/decode HSCW and they use the software to control their dish trackers.  They bounce a signal off the moon (yes, on 6m!) and exchange messages with HSCW.  It's pretty cool.

tanner0441

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #44 on: December 04, 2014, 06:34:20 PM »
Hi

Because when I was first licenced the G8s weren't allowed to use HF everything I did was on VHF and apart from the fact my first WEFAX signals were taken from Bracknell in the UK. the I wanted to take them direct on VHF so I contacted a firm Timestep (now defunct) and joined RIG. I built a quadrafiliar antenna and hoisted it up on the roof. I built a receiver that stepped automatically around 137 Mhz for the strongest signal. I then found 3cms and dishes, but the largest dish I could afford was a 1mtr prime focus dish and a 1.2mtr offset. Later with mixed success I started taking the Geosynchronous satellites but at that time with the LNBs that were available a 1mtr dish was stretching things. We don't have C band so larger dishes are too expensive. Plus I don't think she who would like to be obeyed would take kindly to a 3 or 4mtr dish in the middle of the lawn.

If you look on the internet though you will find people doing EME on 50Ghz and above, apparently after about 400Mhz the attenuation doesn't change too much.

I have bounced signals off the side of a Bedford Van (GM) which we dragged to the top of a big hill with my Land Rover to use as a passive TV repeater.


Brian

Mary B

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #45 on: December 04, 2014, 06:37:23 PM »
Positive it is coming from there and this is not normal background noise, this is a non stop buzz saw noise that is a solid S9 and at the water tower site it spikes and pins the meter on my 897d. Could be a bad power supply, it is radiating back into the power lines and can be picked up 1/4 mile out of town. Xcel Energy is stumped as to the source of it so the people with equipment on the tower are coming out with a spectrum analyzer

Tracked down my interference and called the companies who might be the source. Dish farm on the water tower has wireless internet on it, some telephone links, and some local TV and cable links. So one of the three has some failing equipment. Give them a week to repair it then let the FCC know if they don't

The roll of coax I bought from Radio Shack is Belden cable - it's high quality stuff.

Gosh, are you sure that VHF, UHF and microwave equipment is cause interference at 4 MHz?

I mean, tonight I got a S-5 noise floor on 80m and 10db over on 160, and there is no powerlines or anything around here to cause it.  It's just atmospheric static.  As the sun gets around to the other side of the planet, the 160m band will quiet down around 1:00AM local time, and then you can work some DX on it.  I'm pulling in the nets on 160m tonight on 1,832 and 1,895 but they're under the noise floor sometimes.  There's a late night net that comes on 160m around midnight and that comes in pretty good here because the noise floor drops to S-7 or so.

Usually noise on those bands is natural background noise and some nights are worse than others.  And it's a known fact that if you live near powerlines or in a city you're going to have serious noise on 80 and 160 meters.

There's an antenna design called the K6STI Receive Loop for 80 and 160 meters that was designed by a guy named Brian Beezley.  Google it and check it out.  It works.  You have to use a regular dipole or a vertical for Tx (you'll probably blow the finals out of your linear if you forget to throw the switch to your Tx antenna and key up), but the K6STI Loop might solve your noise problems on the lower freq HF bands and it's a pretty simple antenna to build.

Mary B

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #46 on: December 04, 2014, 06:45:37 PM »
I really need to build a rudimentary spectrum analyzer using a USB software defined radio stick and an upconverter for HF. Uses a laptop for display. I guess once calibrated it can be fairly accurate.

I have played with EME, had a 10 foot dish that I used on 1.2ghz with 300 watts transmit. Was fun but the winds here made it difficult to stay on the moon.  I have also done EME on 144mhz using  a pair of long boom yagis(M2 2M5WL's) on a 15 foot fiberglass cross boom.

High speed CW was originally developed for meteor scatter, I used to play with it, record a ping, slow it and listen to it.

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #47 on: December 04, 2014, 07:54:22 PM »
Positive it is coming from there and this is not normal background noise, this is a non stop buzz saw noise that is a solid S9 and at the water tower site it spikes and pins the meter on my 897d. Could be a bad power supply

Mary, let me know what they find there.  I suppose it could be an old bad switching mode power supply.  But I wonder, if you're pretty sure that's where it's coming from, if one of the companies that has equipment on that tower is transmitting using an old unshielded copper pair?  If they investigate, find nothing wrong and claim it's not a problem, you could always point your beam at that tower, crank the linear, key up and see what blows out in the community.  Fast easy way to find out what's shielded and what's not if they say she's good to go  :o

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #48 on: December 04, 2014, 11:33:32 PM »
We get noise on 80m here too.  Some nights it's quiet.  Some nights there's a whistling type static (like tonight), and sometimes there's sharp static like from constant lightning or an electrical storm.  Usually I can narrow the filters and preserve the audio quality, then shift the passband left or right, or narrow it, to remove the noise as demonstrated here.

http://youtu.be/3nzI_JRq9vM

The guys talking on the radio believe in antennas instead of power.  Nobody on the net runs over 100 watts, but instead concentrates their resources on building antennas that get the job done.  You can tell by the audio quality that everybody on this net runs barefoot transmitters.

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #49 on: December 05, 2014, 12:55:15 AM »
HI Chris.

Pleased you received the PIR I will be interested how you get on. They have about a 10 second dwell time before resetting.

Mary B. I have a problem locally with PLAs and Plasma TVs I went for an Off Center Fed Dipole in the end because the 4:1 balun gives a low DC resistance at the antenna socket and reduced my noise enough to notice, because a lot of the c**p is picked up by the feeder where it runs close to the domestic wiring. Also IP security cameras generate noise especially if they are hard wired back to the router.

I will have a listen around 3.9 Mhz though we only have 3.5 to 3.8 Mhz. I worked a guy in Florida
on 80m the other day so might hear something. I will shut up before I go too far off topic.

Brian

If you really want to null your noise ... try out a helically loaded loop ...

http://antennastealth.com/index.html

one can be built for 80/40 ... tilted for Dx or Local ....

not too far off topic yet?  .... barn light to antenna's ?

Mary B

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #50 on: December 05, 2014, 02:24:46 AM »
I was thinking of a pair of verticals on 80 and 40 sharing the same radial field.. use 1/4 wave spacing on 80m and 1/8 on 40m. Not optimum on 40 but if it works... Have to work out the coax lengths and switching. will get me a little gain and directivity. Next year is get a tribander up. Friend in MT has one he is bringing out along with an old GE VHF repeater amp/power supply/rack to give me some power on 2m. Unless I build a solid state kilowatt over winter, also need to order aluminum etc to build 3 more 2m beams. Not putting up much on 432 this time, maybe a single medium length yagi. Plan is 2 towers, one for 2m only, other will have a small light tribander, a 30 foot long 6m 6ele beam, and maybe a 432 beam.

midwoud1

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #51 on: December 05, 2014, 05:18:10 AM »
Quote
Have you ever played with any of the amateur satellites?

No I was more  focussed on building Antennes (Dish and Yagi ),Photo printer, receivers,converters,
at 137 Mhz.  Is the 6  and 16 meters open to Europe during conditions ?

I used a satellite real tracking map of  NOAA to see and start signal recording.

http://www.dk3wn.info/sat/wetter/sat_noaa19.shtml

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #52 on: December 05, 2014, 09:02:41 AM »
not too far off topic yet?  .... barn light to antenna's ?

There's a limited amount of excitement over a woodshed light.  Now, amateur radio?  We're always building new stuff and our houses look like porcupines with antennas sticking out all over the place  :)

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #53 on: December 05, 2014, 10:46:57 AM »
I was thinking of a pair of verticals on 80 and 40 sharing the same radial field.. use 1/4 wave spacing on 80m and 1/8 on 40m.

I dunno, but verticals on 40 and 80 meter are just too much work, too much ground loss, and unless you can build them really big you'll need matching coils.  It's almost impossible to get a good counterpoise on HF IMO.

My inverted V dipole is 132 feet long and is strung off one of the wind turbine towers.  I got a boom welded on up there about 40 feet off the ground with a pulley on the end of it and a rope that comes to the ground.  The apex of the antenna is tied to the rope and I pull it up.  The ends are on two wood posts about 8 feet off the ground.  It's a $25 antenna, the radiation pattern is almost perfectly omnidirectional, and it works good on both NVIS and long hop skip with very high efficiency on ERP.  The tuner can give the transmitter an almost perfect match from 10 to 80 meters.  It don't work very good on 160 meters.  I have to switch the balun to 1:1 to get a match and the antenna is too short so it don't have very good efficiency.  The only thing that really works on 160 is a full wave sky loop or a big dipole.  It also don't work good on 6 meters because the tuner can't get a good match to the transmitter.

The only downside is that there is high standing waves on the feedline at some freq's so there is dangerous voltages on the antenna and feedline.  If somebody would happen to touch it during transmit there would be a severe RF burn.  But I don't get any RF in the shack from it because the feedline is balanced.

Most of the guys on our net have played with verticals and gave up on them.  They're mostly running 80 meter resonant dipoles 8-20 feet off the ground, or inverted V's with the apex strung off a tower with a beam on it, and going to wood posts like I got.  You don't even have to run the legs of a dipole straight if you don't want.  I know lots of folks who have limited room on a lot and they got the elements of the dipole on a "L" shape, each 1/4 wavelength long, and it works great.

Vertically polarized antennas are fine on VHF and UHF.  Not so great on HF.  And even the folks who do weak signal long distance work on VHF use horizontally polarized antennas, and switch to SSB instead of FM.

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #54 on: December 05, 2014, 11:21:02 AM »
The only thing that really works on 160 is a full wave sky loop or a big dipole.

I should add that long wire antennas work on 160m too.  IF you can get a good counterpoise.  Lots of RF in the shack with long wire antennas though, unless you can figure out a way to use salt water for the counterpoise.  I'd be leery of pushing much more than a couple hundred watts out the back end with a long wire, although lots of people do it.

tanner0441

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #55 on: December 05, 2014, 04:22:11 PM »
Hi

Long wire antennas have a funny impedance but if you feed them through a 9:1 balun with ferrite sleeves on the feeder, or about 10ft of the feeder wrapped round a piece of drain pipe it can be fed with 50 ohm coax and it stops common mode currents going back into the shack.

With all the towers supporting turbines has anyone ever tried delta matching one, should find something works around 40 or 20mtrs.

As for us locating sources of interference it is a waste of time our  Ofcom is about as much use as a boil on the butt. The first thing they say is if it is from any of your equipment you will get the bill. I have tried a laptop with a dongle and HB9 but you really need a log aperiodic for the band width, and that makes it a bit big to wave around.

Brian

 

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #56 on: December 05, 2014, 06:12:50 PM »
I know several folks who use longwire antennas with great success.  I've never tried one, but I might.

I agree that finding noise is a fruitless hunt.  It's everywhere and the lower freq's are affected significantly.  When our Honda generator is running I can hear the arc from the spark plug firing just as plain as day on 160m.  It don't bother a regular AM radio, but the AM radio don't have the sensitivity or the antenna that my ham radio has.

Our off-grid power equipment emits "acceptable" levels of RFI.  But I'm pretty sure that if the radios were in the same building as the power equipment, there'd be noise from it.  Our off-grid power equipment is also highly susceptible to high power (> 1 kW) radio transmissions on 160m.  It causes communications problems on Xanbus (which is ethernet twisted pair).

And I'm pretty sure that if you went driving around in your car with a low band log periodic mounted on the roof looking for the source of low frequency static, somebody is bound to call 9-1-1.

Mary B

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #57 on: December 05, 2014, 06:16:00 PM »
I really lack supports for wire antennas unless I sneak it into a neighbors tree... might do that for a low 80m dipole. I currently use a 43 foot base tuned vertical sitting over about 120 radials. Works very well on 40 and 20, works okay on 80 for long distance contacts but not so good short hop for nets.

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #58 on: December 05, 2014, 06:34:14 PM »
I really lack supports for wire antennas unless I sneak it into a neighbors tree... might do that for a low 80m dipole. I currently use a 43 foot base tuned vertical sitting over about 120 radials. Works very well on 40 and 20, works okay on 80 for long distance contacts but not so good short hop for nets.

My gosh, who buried all those radials?

Have you ever measured the ERP?  The problem with base loaded verticals is that they are basically a 50 ohm dummy load with a radiator stub sticking out of it.

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #59 on: December 05, 2014, 06:54:24 PM »
I really lack supports for wire antennas unless I sneak it into a neighbors tree... might do that for a low 80m dipole.

I don't like trees.  That means pulleys and ropes with a weight to keep the antenna properly tensioned when the wind blows the tree around.  Use the house.  I would assume your house has a peak on the roof someplace.  Put the apex of an inverted V dipole there, run ladder line to it from the balanced output on your tuner (or a balun), and tie the ends off to a couple sawhorses sitting in the yard.  Only takes up 65 feet or so on each side of the house.

An inverted V that close to the ground makes a beautiful NVIS antenna and you'll be gabbing with the locals to 500 miles out on 80 meters as soon as you get it hooked up.  Don't even worry about the length of it or tuning it - just cut the wires at least 1/2 wave @ 3500 Kc and you're good to go.  And don't use a ladder line length that's a 1/4 wave multiple on any band you want to work.  Something like 43 feet works good for 10-80m.  Or multiples of 43 feet.  It'll have way better real world gain than your vertical.

Just make sure nobody is around it or can touch it when you key up the transmitter or they'll get burned pretty good because that antenna design can run thousands of volts.  Next summer when the ground thaws out and you put up your tower, string it off that and put in a couple more permanent 4 x 4's or something that get the ends up a safer distance from the ground where nobody can come in contact with it.

I pretty much guarantee you you will wonder why you were messing with vertical antennas on HF.

Mary B

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #60 on: December 05, 2014, 09:26:37 PM »
Vertical was quick and easy with no supports. Apex of my roof is only 25 feet and I do not have 65 feet both sides for an inverted V without either going into the neighbors lawn, the street, or where the farmer parks his equipment during planting and harvest.

Radials were easy, I set the mower as low as it would go one fall, raked all the grass out, laid the radials right on the lawn and held them down with lawn staples. By the end of the next year you could only find them in a couple spots where they run on bare ground.

Sat view, my house has the light colored roof https://www.google.com/maps/place/231+2nd+Ave+E,+Echo,+MN+56237/@44.6170461,-95.4079407,77m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x878a959b30dbe05f:0x90338a1fd111a000 the tiny white square towards the right and rear a bit is the dog house over the autotuner at the base of the vertical. The Clump of trees east of the house are only 45 feet tall, what looks like a tree in front is being cut down, it is suckers off an old stump, and the patch of brush out back has nothing over 10 feet tall.

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #61 on: December 05, 2014, 10:39:15 PM »
25 feet is plenty high enough for the apex.  If a dipole is less than 1/4 wave off the ground they work the best for NVIS, it makes the radiation pattern more omnidirectional, and they work pretty respectable on long-hop.  I talk to a guy in Texas all the time that has his dipole stapled to the top of a cedar fence - on less than 100 watts of power.

Basically, you can ignore all these people that claim you have to have your antenna 70 feet in the air.  You don't.  You're bouncing off the F2 layer at night and that layer don't care how high your antenna is.  The closer to the horizon you can bounce off it, the longer the skip hop will be.  But then do you know what your going to get?  Some dude in Louisiana that talks in a southern drawl with a roger beep power mic and is impossible to understand.  All the locals out to 500-600 miles you'll be skipping right over the top like your vertical does now.  You have to have the antenna down on the ground so the radiation takeoff angle is really steep and goes just about straight up if you want to have fun on your local nets.

Full wave sky loops also work really good, but it requires four supports, one at each corner of your lot, to hold the loop up to a decent height where you don't get tangled up in it doing normal things around your lot.  It can be fed at any place in the loop.

A dipole also does not have to have the legs or elements straight.  They can be bent in a "L" shape if you want, and it still works fine.  Especially an inverted V dipole, because the maximum current is at the center (the apex) and that is also the point of maximum radiation, while the maximum voltage is at the ends.  So you can come off the roof peak, for instance, run 33 feet in one direction, attach to a fence insulator, and run the next 33 feet in a different direction, parallel with your lot line or something and terminate it on a wood post.  When you put bends in the elements of a dipole, it works best to have the lengths between the bends 1/4 wave length.  Same with a full-wave sky loop - each "leg" should be 1/4 wave length at the highest freq you want to use the antenna on.

When you get your tower up another really neat antenna you could build for really cheap, and that doesn't need to be more than 8 feet off the ground is a delta loop.  One of the guys on our farmer's net has one and you can change it from horizontal to vertical polarization by changing the feedpoint.

There's always a way, that's why they call it "ham engineering".  And none of these wire antennas cost more than about $25 bucks.  Tomorrow I predict you'll wake up realizing you had a "vision" as to how you can put up a 80 meter resonant dipole with what you already have, and it will be so simple you'll slap your forehead and say, "why didn't I see this before?"   ;D

tanner0441

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #62 on: December 06, 2014, 02:20:31 PM »
Hi

If you want to put a discrete antenna support up in a tree. Brown nylon fishing line anything between 25 to 50 lb, fire it though the tree with a catapult and a lump of lead, then pull it through until you can double it tie it to the insulator and pull the antenna up from the other end. you can't see it from any more than about 30ft. I discovered this when I put an antenna up for a couple of quick tests and didn't want to mess around putting pulleys up a tree, it looked as if the antenna was floating between two white insulators, the other end was again fishing line thrown over the house roof and pulled tight and tied to a fence. It has a good stretch factor when the wind blows the tree.

Brian


Mary B

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #63 on: December 06, 2014, 06:04:22 PM »
Being winter my antenna season is on hold for warmth. I no longer do cold weather antenna construction like I have in the past! Talked to the neighbor and I can use that tree for a support, from the lone tall tree on my east side of the house to that one "might" be long enough for an 80m dipole, or one of the shortened Alpha Delta dipoles. Living on the prairie creates challenges when it comes to wire antennas!

Both towers are going to just be 30 footers and house bracketed. Working on a remote release house bracket so I can use a winch to lay the Rohn 25 over for antenna work/preamp repairs. That will also rule out using them for wire antenna supports for the most part.

ChrisOlson

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #64 on: December 06, 2014, 07:29:32 PM »
Both towers are going to just be 30 footers and house bracketed. Working on a remote release house bracket so I can use a winch to lay the Rohn 25 over for antenna work/preamp repairs. That will also rule out using them for wire antenna supports for the most part.

Could make them perfect too, Mary.  Depending on how things are situated, putting say a beam or a 2m on one of the towers, and attaching the center point of your dipole just below it, then anchoring the ends of the dipole to say some wood posts that stick up out of the ground 8 feet or so, placed in the corners of your lot.  Makes a perfect point to feed ladder line to the dipole (with some appropriate stand-offs to keep it away from the steel about 6" to a foot).  Put a balun at the point where the ladder line starts outside the house, and feed the balun with coax from the tuner inside the house.

If you put like a pulley on your tower you can let your antenna down (or raise it) with a rope thru the pulley.  That will allow you to raise and lower your tower without having to disconnect anything on the dipole - just lower the dipole to the ground first.  An inverted V dipole is supposed to have a 90 degree angle in it, but it doesn't have to.  At ~30 feet at the apex and 8 feet off the ground on the ends, it will work fine and achieve the desired result, and be almost perfectly omni-directional.

If the towers are on opposite ends of the house, you could also go tower to tower with your wire (fed in the center), then angle down to the ground (or wood posts) off the towers for the rest of the length.  That would also work, although I should get some antenna modeling software to see how that one would come out (in theory).  I mention it because I thought about do it here between two wind turbine towers.

Mary B

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Re: Solar Powered Woodshed
« Reply #65 on: December 07, 2014, 05:13:58 PM »
2m beams will have elevation, no wires off the tower. Been there done that snagged the dipole and almost snapped a boom on one antenna when I had the beams up 35 degrees. So 2m tower will have the 4 2m beams and the 2m vert in the middle where it won't be an issue