January 22, 2023 ❤️ 🤠 🎉 📶
Finally the big day -- installing a proper antenna. A couple of weeks ago, we had set a base for the mast in cement. It seemed like the "big day" would never come. Besides waiting for the cement to harden, we had a few days of rain and then other events scheduled. Finally we had a day availble. Perfect weather, too. The mast and antenna went up rather quickly. Used some scrap wood and metal to fashion a bracket to the gable end of the house. Then ran the ground wire and coax down and into the house. Sledged a grounding rod into that nice soft East Texas sand, like a knife through butter. And even easier than that because I wasn't the one doing the sledging! Next came my lesson in prepping coax for the Amphenol 83-1SP connector, followed by a lesson in soldering. I learned that we need a new soldering tip. Can you still get those for a 45 year old Weller 60? Well, the good news is that I was able to connect the antenna to the radio and made some contacts on a couple of the area repeaters. So that's just what I wanted to do. Now I can join the local nets through my radio rather than through Echolink or the ZumRadio pistar. Yee-haw!