Slow Going

     Other than routine -- laundry, dishes and the network politics shows -- I spent today on antenna projects.  Between heat, humidity and my bad back, it's not quick.  I measured and assembled the long side of an off-center-fed dipole antenna, having already done the short side, made with heavy solid wire.  I'm not sure how well it will hold up, but I've always wanted to try, and I had a small stock of what once passed for industrial scrap, accumulated over decades.  It's cut for the 40 meter ham band, which means about 66 feet of wire overall -- some "scrap!"

     I'd had an older version once, taken down years ago when we had tree work done, coiled up and stashed in the flowerbed it used to hang above.  The insulators survived, and maybe the homemade matching transformer, but the stranded wire was greenish and the coaxial cable looked iffy once I located my antenna analyzer and tested it.  (My YouKits imported antenna analyzer is at least ten years old; modern "nano vector network analyzers" will run rings around it* for about what I paid, but it's simple and gives a quick indication if you've got an antenna or a lump, a good coaxial cable or a bad one.)

     This week promises rain, so progress may be even slower.  That's okay -- stringing up an antenna in a hurry is never a good idea, and that goes double when trying to avoid back strain.
____________________
* Almost literally "rings," since they'll do the useful Smith Chart display, while mine only gives a plot of impedance and SWR over a selected frequency range, around a selected center frequency.