Had another gale blow through this week, but not quite as bad as the last one. More dust and sand blown around than trees. And the wild flowers are out in force now.
Play to hear USCG weather from Pt. Reyes, 500 miles away.
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| Easter Tomatoes |
March 31, 2016
I continued messing with the SSB radio and ended up reconfiguring the counterpoise (AKA antenna ground). Clearly it's a dark art. The experts not only disagree with each other, they apparently also disagree with themselves. To wit, Gordon West said "Remember, don't be attaching this copper foil to through-hulls that have been purposely left unbonded." (Emphasis in the original.) But in another place in the same document he said "If your underwater metals are not connected by a green bond wire, you may wish to use a single through-hull that is isolated...as your first point of establishing an underwater ground connection." So, I decided to ere on the side of caution and get more foil, disconnect from the through-hulls, and connect instead to the lead keel,the big stainless steel water tank, the lifelines and the small immersed ground plate. It's a lot harder to do than write. Since I haven't been able to test transmission at a distance, it's hard to tell if the changes made any difference. I have been able to listen to one of the Baja nets (poorly) and heard a couple of Mexicans chatting in Spanish. I may try the 'aluminum foil in the water' test if I get ambitious.
Had another gale blow through this week, but not quite as bad as the last one. More dust and sand blown around than trees. And the wild flowers are out in force now.
Had another gale blow through this week, but not quite as bad as the last one. More dust and sand blown around than trees. And the wild flowers are out in force now.
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Your best bet is to pull the boat and get an real grounding plate, else you're going to be snaking copper all over the place and connecting to a speculative grounding peg with the potential for a lot noise from a multitude of sources which you won't know until you actually need the radio. All these hacks appear to make you clever, or make you think you are by getting some small result, but the best solution is still the simplest and that is ground the radio with a plate built and used only for that purpose.
ReplyDeleteYou might also try your luck with this if you don't want to deal with grounding plates and copper tape worms
http://www.kiss-ssb.com/index.html
Carol reporting in mate!
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